My parents were newspaper readers. Wherever we lived, there was a daily, local newspaper and a number of magazines available and, in 1965, once I learned to read, I tackled all of them. One thing that always caught my attention were articles about our soldiers in Vietnam. Usually these articles were filed through news agencies, and were featured on pages about halfway into the first section. I remember puzzling through these stories, and since the police action was occurring throughout my young life, it was not only news but current events. It just kept going.

In 1968, the Tet Offensive made more and more news come closer to the front page, above the fold, and onto television. My parents let me read all these things and answered my questions as they could. It could not have been easy for them.

In A.A. Freda's A Police Action, we meet James Coppi, an Italian-born man lounging in a honky-tonk bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is on leave and really just wants to drink his beer until a young woman named Samantha enters his life, and dares him to become a part of hers. At first, James thinks Samantha, or Sam, would be just the thing to entertain him until he has to leave for Vietnam. But, when Sam has a problem that won't go away on its own, James decides he must help her. He is not a typical soldier. James is not a lifer, so-called, that serves in the military during a war that is not called a war, simply because he looks at service as his duty. Instead, as a hustler of sorts, he looks on his tour of duty as something that will benefit him, and let him fulfill his service as a means to an end. By serving in Vietnam, James will get out of worse conditions at home, and maybe get rid of Sam. But Sam has other ideas.

As I read this book, I found myself casting actors to characters. I thought Jeremy Renner would be a fine James Coppi, and that Jennifer Lawrence would be a terrific Sam. This book reads true, as a semi-memoir, especially since the author served in Vietnam during the setting of this book. Although A Police Action is written as a love story set during a particularly dark part of our nation's history, I found the scenes Freda wrote about the life of a soldier in Vietnam, with its jargon, practices and horrors, as ringing more true than the love story between James and Sam. A Police Action is a book well worth reading, but it leaves the reader wanting more of either the love story or the conflict, not both. Perhaps that was its intent. The reader must decide for him- or herself.