Defined by Newsweek as "the best Vietnam novel ever written", this book, the first work from a ex-combatant who knows even too well the hell described in these grim and tormented pages, has now become a Stanley Kubrick movie.  Vietnam, 1968:  after a savage training where they risk their lives, young Marines are thrown into a nightmarish landscape blackened by napalm and littered with corpses.  It's the place where war finally gives up the mask of glory, honor, manhood and patriotism, to show his true face:  the dirtiest, most painful, most frightening, most disgusting, most useless death. Private Jocker talks to us in first person, with a brutal honesty that can leave the reader speechless:  he's literally telling us unspeakable truths.  His story, and the story of his squad of young men gone mad, involves the reader until he's there: feeling the M16's weight on hisshoulder, hearing the jungle's noises and the wounded men's screams, in his nostrils the smell of rotting corpses, dead in a war that wasn't their's.

     The careful and refined Italian translation by Pier Francesco Paolini gives us the savory taste of a frontline slang.  This edition is also enriched by notes (some from the author himself) not only helping the text's comprehension, but opening a view on the reality of a war that has created an entirely new language.