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This book combines fictional dramatization with memoir to tell the story of a firebase under attack during the Vietnam War. It also explores the fate of a fighter pilot lost over Laos during America’s long involvement in that Southeast Asia conflict. This melding of reportage, creative storytelling, and commentary on historical perspective definitely adds additional information, but it is frequently at the expense of pace, often interrupting suspense at inopportune times. Still, there’s no denying author Ahlin’s expertise. The Commander’s time spent on the USS Kitty Hawk between 1969 and 1971 provides the background to fill his book with unquestioned authenticity. His accounts of a young American coming face to face with a culture vastly different from his own ring with humility and truth.
While forays into the period’s politics, policies, and propaganda are interspersed throughout, it is the struggle for survival at an outnumbered outpost, and the mystery of a pilot’s disappearance, that form the axis on which this tale turns. Ahlin’s stirring account of young Marines’ bravery and valor exhibited under hellish conditions is grippingly intense. He pulls no punches recounting the obstacles put in his path by foreign countries and his own as he attempts to track down a pilot who’s officially missing in action, but just might have been spirited away to the Soviet Union.
For anyone interested in the Vietnam War era, Overrun provides perspective from one individual who didn’t just watch it on television, but rather one who experienced it personally on the warships and at the firebases in country.