Sông Bé - Paperback

by Richard Barlow Adams (Author), Hannah Linder (Cover Design by)

Sông Bé, a fact-based narrative told in flashback from a present-day evening concert at the New Orleans Orpheum Theater, features a fit, world-renowned architect, Richard Foxworth, a West Point graduate, who reacts to what his wife finds in his old Army footlocker. It triggers long-buried memories of his role in 1968 as a second lieutenant in the Vietnam War during the Tet Offensive battle of Sông Bé, the physical wounds he sustained in the battle, his treatment at Rollingwood Sanitarium for post-traumatic stress, the dream that haunted him nightly after the battle, and the loss of a West Point classmate. Threaded through the story is a history of the American civil rights movement since the 1950s.

The factual bases for Adams' fourth historical narrative are derived from the author's research and experiences as the son of a career Army officer, the first of three brothers to graduate from West Point, a Vietnam War veteran, an Army aviator serving in the Middle East, a student of American history, a civil/environmental engineer, an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University and the United States Military Academy, and the founder of an international consulting engineering company.

Born in 1945, a month after V-J Day, Adams has always seen himself as part of a generation that grew up in a time of great change and hope for a brighter and more equal world, those espousing racial equality and equality of sexes being increasingly heard.

Relevant to the authenticity of the military and battle elements of the story, the Battle of Sông Bé specifically, and American history, five months after graduating from West Point in June 1967, Adams was one of the first in the Class of 1967 to serve in the Vietnam War and fought in the Battle of Sông Bé on February 18, 1968, during what would be called the Tet Offensive. Prior to deployment to Vietnam to serve with the 101st Airborne Division as a forward observer for D Company, 1/506th Infantry Battalion, and fire direction officer for A Battery, 2/319 Artillery Battalion, he shared a barracks room with a sharp African-American lieutenant, Clyde Oates, for Airborne training. At the end of the first week of training, Oates responded to him as Redman does in Sông Bé when queried by Foxworth if he wanted to go into Columbus, Georgia, with the guys for a few beers and to blow off steam ... it wasn't going to happen.

Significant to the story, as an Army captain, Adams served as a Casualty Assistance Officer to a family suffering the loss of a husband/father killed in Vietnam, and prior to resigning his commission in 1974, administered the race relations program and unit-wide race relations seminars for a major U.S. Army command in Germany, the 24th Engineer Group, during a period of intense racial unrest in the armed forces.

Adams' other historical narratives include:

The Parting: A Story of West Point on the Eve of the Civil War

Eben Kruge: How "A Christmas Carol" Came to be Written

Charlie's Ashes: A Greatest Generation Story

A collegiate gymnast and former Vail Resorts ski instructor, Adams is a man of faith, married with two children and five grandchildren, and currently serves as the chief strategy officer for an innovative "clean" renewable energy company, Ion Power Group LLC, writing historical fiction as time allows.