Precious Freedom: A Novel

FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS COMES PRECIOUS FREEDOM, A NOVEL OF THE WAR IN VIETNAM.   

The Vietnam War was a tragedy for America—and for Vietnam. But for the Vietnamese, it was also a victory: they defeated the world’s wealthiest country and most powerful military.  James Bradley, the author of Flags of Our Fathers, began to wonder, How did they win?

Precious Freedom explores this question in a powerful novel that is drawn from the pages of history. Informed by ten years of research and hundreds of interviews with US Marines, Viet Cong snipers, and Vietnamese fighters, politicians, and leaders, Precious Freedom is storytelling at its finest. 

In 1967, nineteen-year-old Chip Zobel enlists in the Marines, answering his government's call to defend democracy in South Vietnam. But what he finds on the ground shakes his faith: poisoned punji sticks, rotting uniforms, Agent Orange–tainted drinking water, constant ambushes, a brutal case of malaria—and the realization that many of the Viet Cong he’s fighting are actually South Vietnamese locals—the men and women he thought he was fighting to defend.

Back home, Chip's mother, Betty, initially a staunch supporter of the war, begins to question its morality. His father, Hank, a former Navy corpsman who fought in the Battle of Saipan during World War II, grows skeptical as he begins to read US military reports that compare Ho Chi Minh to George Washington—a fierce patriot who leads his people to freedom.

Meanwhile, in a quiet Vietnamese hamlet, fifteen-year-old May watches as a US Marine kills her father. She flees to the forest and joins a Viet Cong training camp. Three months later, she makes her first kill as a sniper—eventually, she will kill four more Americans with her rifle. Unbeknownst to her, her path will ultimately cross with that of the Marine who killed her father—Chip Zobel.

James Bradley wrote Precious Freedom to honor all who served in Vietnam and to help a new generation understand the war’s complex truths.

This is a story that America has never been told.

“James Bradley journeyed to Iwo Jima and returned with Flags of Our Fathers and now ventures to Vietnam and brings us Precious Freedom, where he reveals that if we’d known what happened in the 1960s in Vietnam, American mothers would never have sent their children to Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is the best vaccination against great lies.”—Oliver Stone