Once a Warrior King by David Donovan.

Just finished Once a Warrior King by David Donovan.  Donovan is the nom de plume of Terry T. Turner.  In the late sixties, the US military came up with the idea of seeding small five person Mobile Advisory Teams across rural Vietnam to help win hearts and minds by assisting small remote communities with military and self-defense training, basic health, some infrastructure work, etc.

The teams would also lead/assist the local militia in attacks and ambushes on Viet Cong and NVA troops in their areas.  Further, the small units served as an extended intelligence network.

Each team consisted of two officers (Captain or Lieutenants) and three NCOs, as well as a local interpreter.  The ambition and reality was breathtaking.

Donovan was a recent college graduate who had perhaps a years worth of training in Basic Training, Officer Candidate School, Language training and presumably some additional MOS training of sorts.  He was airlifted from the US to Vietnam, had a week or two acclimation in the vicinity of Saigon and was then helicoptered to his base way out in the Mekong Delta.  

Each team member spent a year in their MAT role, subject to rotations and wounds.  They were outside the official military chain in terms of supplies and orders.  They had little or no direct engagement with other Americans for days and weeks at a time.  They typically had no amenities such as electricity, built structures, air conditioning, reliable communications, food supplies, etc.  

Hence the Warrior King - at 23 Donovan was in the position of some fusion Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz from Heart of Darkness and something out of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King.  Indeed, soon after his arrival, his Captain essentially loses attachment with reality and causes a problem so catastrophic he has to be immediately relieved and replaced by Donovan.

Donovan is essentially the King, Warlord, final arbiter, intermediary with a distant and estranged government, dispenser of Justice, and the man with life and death decision making.

At 23.  With no support or mentorship.  In the middle of nowhere.

MAT was not a long lived program and while conceptually intriguing and conceivably effective, it can only have worked with the best, the brightest, the best motivated.  And no system can assure that everyone always fits all those attributes.  Donovan, though, did.

His account is eye opening, engaging, literate, challenging, moving.  A first class story right up there with the classics.