There’s a book called Hunting the Jackal, published in 2004 by a man named Billy Waugh, and if you submitted its contents as fiction to any editor in New York, it would come back in six weeks with a polite note about plausibility.
In the book, the protagonist tries to enlist in the Marines at fifteen, gets arrested hitchhiking across the New Mexico desert because he has no identification and refuses to give the police his name. He goes home, finishes high school with a 4.0, joins the Army at eighteen, and deploys to Korea with the 187th Airborne. He meets a couple of Green Berets on a train in Germany, volunteers on the spot, and earns one of the first berets issued by the newly formed Special Forces.
He deploys to Vietnam five times, where he trains irregular forces in the jungle, conducts night raids along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and is shot in the knee, the ankle, the foot, and the forehead during a single engagement at Bong Son. Left between the lines and presumed dead by the enemy, …