He went back to Vietnam to finish a war. He stayed to fight a different one.
It is January 1972, and the United States is walking away from Vietnam. Captain DeAndre Washington - Silver Stars, Purple Heart, third tour - is not. Assigned as an advisor to the 11th Battalion of the South Vietnamese Rangers near Kon Tum, he lands expecting a year of paperwork, radios, and restraint. What he finds instead is a country in free fall, a South Vietnamese command rotten with corruption and ethnic hatred, and a people the world is about to forget: the Jarai.
The Montagnards - the "Dega" - are the Christian hill tribes of the Central Highlands. They fought and bled for the Americans. They are despised by the Vietnamese on both sides of the war. And DeAndre, a first-generation college graduate from segregated Georgia, understands them at a level he never expected. When he falls in love with Chel - a Jarai woman of uncommon strength - the arc of his life bends away from the Army and toward a cause Washington has already decided to abandon.
From the siege of Kon Tum during the 1972 Easter Offensive, to a staged "capture" that lets him vanish into the jungle, to his years with FULRO - the Dega resistance army hunted across three countries - Never Vanquished follows DeAndre and Chel across three decades of love, war, exile, and faith. It sweeps from Vietnamese longhouses to Cambodian jungle camps to the Montagnard refugee community of North Carolina, and finally back to the highlands where the fight was never truly finished.