Author Tom Campbell, a U.S. Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, calls this book a novel about the enemy. The enemy is a platoon of fifteen-year-old boys ordered to carry more than a ton of cargo down a primitive network of trails and roads known to the Vietnamese as the Old Man's Trail but called the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the West. Led by a veteran Vietcong cadre named Duan, the boys endure a brutal physical and mental test in the course of their 650-mile struggle south. The hazards are numerous and lethal: raging rivers, slick jungle trails, steep mountain drop-offs, poisonous snakes, shortages of food and medicine, and the ever-persistent Americans and their endless supply of bombs. This is a tale of courage, motivation, survival, love, teamwork, and one man's determination to survive. For Campbell, Duan is the personification of the Vietnamese patriot and soldier - a soldier first, a nationalist second, a tacit Communist third. And the author believes that it was men like Duan who drove the world's most powerful nation from Vietnam in 1975.