AN UNLIKELY LOVE STORY

LULLABIES FOR LIEUTENANTS

Adapted from the award-winning memoir by Franklin Cox: When Foxtrot Company performs a punitive search and destroy mission in a hornet’s nest of a village, a young Marine, Lt. Franklin Cox, falls into an unusual but close relationship with Linh, an 80-year old Vietnamese woman and the village matriarch. The entire community is scheduled for a brief removal, but Frank feels compelled to allow her to stay. As Linh reveals a hidey-hole bunker beneath her house from where she watched Japanese and French troops murder her husband and son, the old woman and Frank forge a deep spiritual bond, an improbable matriarchal love affair.

Frank and Foxtrot Company become surrounded in a massive rice paddy ambush as a Vietcong battalion rakes the Marines with mortar and machine gun fire. Frank helps save the company by directing massive artillery fire, but his unit still suffers major casualties. He sees friends killed just feet away. Severely wounded, in anguish, lost and alone in the bush, Frank ends up in Linh’s bunker where she succors him by singing a lullaby as she attends his wounds. He lives. And goes home. In turmoil.

What will Frank find on his return trip? Does Linh still live? Will the same VC lieutenant still be lurking in the village, determined to destroy him? Will Frank find the medicine that will save his soul? Stand by.