But, long before DeMille's most common prefix was "NY Times best-selling author," he was called Lt. DeMille and led an infantry platoon of the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam. He has drawn on his wartime experience to pen two Vietnam novels—1985's Word of Honor and 2002's Up Country. Both showcase DeMille's talent as a storyteller. But, more than that, they represent an attempt to exorcise the ghosts of the war—an attempt that will resonate with many of DeMille's fellow veterans.

DeMille's books are meant to be read and enjoyed, not endlessly parsed over cappuccinos in the faculty lounge. They are conventionally plotted (beginning, middle, end), clearly written, politically incorrect, and don't confuse irony for sophistication.In other words, anathema for our academic elites.

The book critics, who have to answer to editors and publishers instead of hiding behind tenure, can't ignore someone who sells as many books as DeMille, but they can dismiss him with faint praise. So they note his faculty for storytelling: "[an] incredibly versatile storyteller"; "An intelligent and accomplished storyteller"; "[a] muscular storyteller. "What they don't say is that "storyteller" is often code for popular and popular means lowbrow to these pseudo-snobs. If it's not dense with metaphor and wrapped in irony, it's not literature. You know: art.

What these well-schooled but poorly educated folk forget is that storytelling is at the heart of all great literature. Starting with Homer. Anyone who's read his Iliad and Odyssey will agree that he's a versatile, intelligent, accomplished, and muscular storyteller. He also had quite a popular following.

Now, while DeMille is good, he's no Homer. We're just trying to make a point. DeMille is closer to Hemingway, whom he identifies as an early influence on his writing. The influence is most visible in DeMille's concise sentences and muscular language. He also admits to an affinity for Graham Greene, which is evident in his exotic settings and his thematic search for moral equilibrium.(Greene wrote what remains the best novel on collision between Vietnam and the West, The Quiet American.)

The major thrust of Word of Honor and Up Country is three-fold: what the war did to us (especially the warriors on both sides but also the larger societies, its long reach, and the possibility of finally exorcising its ghosts. That the books, published seventeen years apart—Word of Honor in 1985, Up Country in 2002—turn on the same themes is proof of the war's long reach and persistent ghosts.

In Word of Honor, a former infantry officer in Vietnam is called to account for a long-hidden massacre that occurred on his watch.Almost two decades removed from Vietnam, Ben Tyson is a successful executive and pillar of the community. When a writer researching a book on the Tet Offensive pins the massacre of over 100 civilians at a hospital outside Hue on Tyson's platoon, his life slowly collapses around him. Facing a public relations nightmare, the Army quickly charges Tyson with murder and hauls him before a court-martial.

Like the non-fictional Lt. William Calley of My Lai infamy, the fictional Lt. Ben Tyson alone will stand accused for the sins of Vietnam. As Tyson wryly and bitterly reflects, "57,939 sacrifices weren't enough."DeMille is clearly unhappy that neither the military brass nor the government has ever taken ownership of the war and that the onus, then and now, always falls on the troops.

Tyson's trial is intended to be cathartic, and it is . . . to a degree.But, despite the courtroom exorcism, the ghosts linger.

Perhaps that's what led DeMille back to Vietnam in 1997. Ostensibly, he returned to research the novel that became Up Country, but the ghosts clearly were calling. You can hear them throughout Up Country. And, despite the assurances of his main character Paul Brenner—DeMille's alter ego as a First Cavalry Division infantryman before, during, and after the Tet Offensive—it's not at all clear that's he's made his peace with the war.

DeMille brings Army homicide cop Brenner, the hero of The General's Daughter, out of retirement to investigate the alleged murder of an American officer during the Tet Offensive. Not only did the crime take place thirty years earlier, but the only evidence of it is a letter taken off the body of a North Vietnamese soldier by an American G.I. The purloined letter, written by the dead soldier's brother, indicates that he observed one American officer murder another.

The Army wants Brenner to return to Vietnam in an unofficial capacity—posing as a tourist—and find out if the letter writer survived the war. Despite his misgivings, Brenner allows himself to be talked into going.The rest is part travelogue, part flashback to the war, and part thriller.

Brenner is detained at the Saigon airport, shadowed and harassed by a skeptical Col. Mang of the Security Police, and seduced by his contact, Susan Weber, an ex-pat investment banker with a secret. His journey takes him from Saigon north to Nha Trang, Hue, Dien Bien Phu, and Hanoi. Along the way, DeMille offers a detailed snapshot of contemporary Vietnam.Much has changed since the war, but much remains the same. A new battle—for the future—is raging between market reformers and a statist rearguard, and the outcome is still uncertain.

Brenner also visits his old battlefields—Quang Tri Province, the A Shau Valley, and Khe Sanh—and faces his personal ghosts. Brenner (DeMille) insists that he's finally put the past to rest with this trip, but we remain unconvinced.DeMille leaves too much evidence to the contrary. "Like most soldiers," Brenner muses at one point, "he didn't understand how the politicians could give away what had been bought in blood. "On another occasion, Brenner tells his interpreter, "'Tell him . . . America still remembers its South Vietnamese allies,' which was total bullshit, but sounded good."Still sounds conflicted to me.

Maybe it's still too soon.Maybe, in fact, Vietnam will haunt us until the last of the Baby Boomers pass on. Maybe only then can the last chapter on the war be written.

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The Wit and Wisdom of Nelson DeMille

1."Any fool, including an ROTC lieutenant can be a military genius at the breakfast table twenty years later."

2."Hope is nothing more than deferred despair."

3."I was . . . a JAG lawyer with a Combat Infantry Badge, living proof that even lawyers have balls."

4."Ultimately all war stories are bullshit . . . From the