TL;DR
Medal of Honor recipient Bennie Adkins, a retired command sergeant major, tells the story of the 1966 fight for Camp A Shau, where 17 Green Berets held out against a far larger North Vietnamese force. He wrote it with journalist Katie Lamar Jackson.
In March 1966, seventeen Green Berets and their South Vietnamese allies held a small camp in the A Shau Valley against a North Vietnamese force roughly ten times their size. Sergeant First Class Bennie Adkins fought for 38 hours, much of it on a mortar, much of it wounded.
He received the Medal of Honor for it in 2014, 48 years later.
A Tiger among Us is the story of those days, written with Katie Lamar Jackson and published by Da Capo Press in May 2018.
What is A Tiger among Us about?
The battle for Camp A Shau and what came after it. Adkins was the intelligence sergeant of Special Forces Detachment A-102, and the book follows the siege hour by hour: the mortar duels, the wounded men he carried to safety, and the last evacuation helicopter leaving without him. Then comes the escape. Adkins and a handful of survivors spent two days evading the enemy in the jungle before they were rescued.
The authors built the book from Adkins’s own oral history and interviews with five other survivors. It ends at the White House ceremony in September 2014 where he finally received the medal, 48 years after the battle. President Obama presented it. He’d received the Distinguished Service Cross for the same fight in 1967, and the upgrade came long after most of the men who served with him at A Shau were gone.
Who was Bennie Adkins?
Adkins was drafted in 1956, volunteered for Special Forces in 1961 and served three tours in Vietnam.
He was born in Waurika, Oklahoma, in 1934 and drafted in December 1956. Later in his career he served at Fort Huachuca, graduated in the third class of the Sergeants Major Academy and ran training at the jungle warfare school in the Panama Canal Zone.
He retired in 1978 as a command sergeant major, then earned three degrees, ran an accounting firm in Auburn, Alabama, for 22 years and started a foundation that gives scholarships to Special Forces soldiers leaving the service. He died of complications from COVID-19 in April 2020 and is buried at Arlington.
Who is Katie Lamar Jackson?
An Alabama journalist, editor and photographer with more than thirty years in the business, who spent years as an editor at Auburn University. She helped Adkins shape decades of memory into a book while he could still tell it.
Adkins spoke about the book at the National Archives in Washington in July 2018.
Why does A Tiger among Us belong on this shelf?
It’s a senior enlisted leader’s book, and those are rare.
It also shows how one event can carry a whole book. Adkins didn’t write his life story. He wrote three days and let the rest of his life frame them.
The credit line tells the rest.
A veteran in his eighties had the memories, and a working journalist helped turn them into a book. Many of the best war memoirs get written exactly that way, often just in time.
His Distinguished Service Cross came in 1967. The Medal of Honor came in 2014, and the book followed four years later, while he could still tell it himself. He died two years after it came out.
Keep reading
Hiring a ghostwriter for a retired general’s or admiral’s leadership book: how senior military leaders turn a career into a book, and what has to stay out.
- A Tiger among Us: A Story of Valor in Vietnam's A Shau Valley, Hachette Book Group
- Command Sergeant Major Bennie G. Adkins, U.S. Army
- Katie Jackson, Auburn University School of Communication and Journalism
- Medal of Honor recipient Bennie Adkins has died of coronavirus, Military Times
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