• By Tom Mayer

Mississippi author Rick DeStefanis with the seventh book in his Vietnam War Series. ’Specter of Betrayal’ is a sequel to 2022’s offering, ‘The Ghost.’

   If Rick DeStefanis isn’t on the plains writing westerns — “Rawlins: No Longer Young” kicked off that series in 2018 — you’ll likely find him immersed in environs similar to Cuc Phuong, Vietnam’s oldest national park and a dense jungle of primitive forests inhabited by mosquitoes, dense heat, exotic animals and, once upon a time, predators intent on killing American soldiers.

The tally of DeStefanis’ Vietnam War Series now comes to seven, with the most recent, “Specter of Betrayal: The Ghost II,” arising as a haunting sequel to 2023’s “The Ghost.”

DeStefanis doesn’t just write war stories. He writes war stories laced with meditations on the human condition, exploring themes of guilt, redemption and, especially in these last two books, ghosts of the past.

So it is with “Specter of Betrayal.” But before we get to that book, a caveat from the author: “This is the second book in the two-part story about ‘The Ghost.’ If you haven’t read book one, I strongly recommend that you read it first. Much of what is written in this second book is a continuation of that story, and it will make this one more understandable and enjoyable,” DeStefanis writes in a note to readers.

In other words, you’ll have to do some homework before you get to Book II, and that’s a good thing because this is what I published about Book I, “The Ghost,” a couple of years ago:

‘The Ghost’

Rick DeStefanis writes his own brands of fiction — Southern, Western and military — from his home in North Mississippi, but slide into any one of his much-praised series, and you’re anywhere but in the Magnolia State.

The most recent of those is “The Ghost,” the sixth book in DeStefanis’ Vietnam War canon. Based on true events from during that war, the series has been compared favorably with the likes of early Vietnam writers such as Tim O’Brien (“The Things They Carried”) and James Webb (“Field of Fire”), and it’s likely the author’s early 1970’s experience as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division that so accurately flavors his humanizing stories.

“The Ghost,” though, isn’t quite like any of those earlier offerings. Easily the best of the six — all but the first two, ‘The Gomorrah Principle’ (2013) and ‘Melody Hill’ (2015) are standalone novels — DeStefanis textures this military fiction with Native American spirituality, conceptualizing a harrowing descent into the war’s, and country’s, inner bowels.

Prompted by his father, second lieutenant Martin Shadows visits his Lakota Sioux grandfather just before he departs for Vietnam. Shadows will be in-country as a military intelligence officer, and so foresees little of the danger new officers typically combat. His grandfather — a man he had met only once before, and then as a child — foretells a different future, four visions that cast Shadows in the fiery light of enemy conflict.

The rational soldier discounts the visit with his elder, but being immediately called into a secret mission upon arriving in Vietnam sets his grandfather’s foreshadows alive: Exploits with a North Vietnamese spy, isolation in a North Vietnamese prison and other increasingly horrific events prove the truth of his grandfather’s foresight.

“There are many ways to find a man’s deepest fears,” Shadows is told by a commandant in Vietnam. If only he had listened to his grandfather, Shadows will come to realize, he might not have had to discover this on his own. Set during the Vietnam era, “The Ghost” is a novel for today — both a mixture of superstition and mysticism, and a heralding addition to the reality of American war fiction. And so we turn to book two, a worthy successor to that lead-in.

’Specter of Betrayal’

Haunted by the desperation of the Montagnards, Shadows is drawn back to Vietnam. These indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands of Vietnam participated heavily in the Vietnam War and were recruited by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and its American and Australian allies. And paid the price for their alliance.

Given the close similarities between the spiritual and physical heritages between the Lakota-Sioux and Montagnards, Shadows feels no other choice but to return to the battlefield to help the people he felt he left behind. When he unearths a deep betrayal against those he’s come to rescue, the fire turns “friendly” and it’s up to the officer, amid airstrikes and treachery from his own superiors and supposed protectors, to lead the Montagnards to an American safe zone.

As with his previous offerings, the pacing of “Specter” is unflagging and DeStefanis doesn’t shy away from the brutal realities of combat with scenes built to emphasize the horror of war and the psychological toll it can take on those immersed in it.

Couple this with the author’s vivid sensory capture of the war — you can smell gasoline as the thudding pulse of helicopter blades resonate throughout the canopy — and the result is a novel that pays tribute not only to those who served in Vietnam and elsewhere, but to the lingering effects of betrayal as the lines between friend and foe blur — and loyalties are tested to the extreme.

Reach reviewer Tom Mayer at tmayer@cullmantimes.com.