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For DeMille and the thousands of other veterans who served in U.S. military forces, however, Vietnam was and remains an overwhelming and inexplicable experience. "You don't want to inflict it verbally on people," says DeMille, who will visit Borders Books & Music in Bethel Park on Monday. "But I think when you are writing it down, in quiet moments, it all comes out.

"You have to pick and choose, because anybody who has been there can't stop — if they've been in combat, they can go on forever."

Four years ago, DeMille was asked to return to Vietnam to write an article for Mungo Park, a former Microsoft online travel site. He told friends, including two fellow vets who would accompany him on the trip, that it was just an assignment. He knew, however, that there were a few unresolved issues left over from his tour of duty.

"I was probably older than the average soldier," he says. "When I was there, I was 25, a college graduate, and I was an officer, so I don't think I was traumatized as much by the war. I was also a history major, and I had read everything I could. … So I think I approached it with more of an academic interest at first — until I got shot at for the first time. Then it wasn't academic anymore."

In "Up Country," Paul Brenner (the protagonist from DeMille's novel "The General's Daughter") returns to Vietnam because of a letter that appears 30 years after it was written by a North Vietnamese soldier to his brother. Brenner, a retired U.S. Army criminal investigator, must find out whether the letter's allegation — that an Army captain murdered one of his lieutenants — is true.

In the A Shau Valley in May 1968, DeMille, who served as a lieutenant with the 1st Air Cavalry of the U.S. Army, retrieved a letter from the body of a dead North Vietnamese soldier. When he returned to that area in central Vietnam in 1997, there were ghosts to be confronted.

"That's where I came close to being killed about 10 times, and it gave me nightmares for years after," he says. "I wanted to stand there in the valley and kind of deal with it, and I thought about all the people who were killed around me, all the enemy soldiers who I found dead.

"It was good. It was cathartic, and I put a lot of things to rest, because there was no one shooting at me in the A Shau Valley anymore. That was one part of Vietnam that stayed with me forever and why I had to go back there."

DeMille also wanted to see Quang Tri province, where he was stationed during the Tet offensive of 1968. That year, the area was heavily damaged; then, in 1972, it was bombed by American forces and, according to DeMille, nearly obliterated.

"I had an almost ghoulish interest in seeing what happened to where I spent a year of my life," he says. "And I was totally shocked that this place had not recovered at all, or very little. It was still underpopulated, still very heavily damaged, much more so than when I left."

Some things had not changed. Upon his return, DeMille found the South Vietnamese people to be as nice and kind as he remembered them from his tour of duty. The North Vietnamese, especially some of what he calls government "apparatchiks," were another story.

"I ran into a few North Vietnamese officers who were extremely unfriendly," he says. "They were so different from the Vietnamese people. We had passes to go into certain areas that were off-limits, and even with the passes they were just nasty people. I think in a country of happy Buddhists, people who are so easygoing, it's strange to find that kind of difference. … It's sort of like the bad guys won."

Most of DeMille's trip, however, struck happier chords. On Tet Eve, in January 1997 in the city of Hue, he and his group ran into a group of younger Americans, men and women in their 30s, who wanted to hear the war stories. (DeMille would later construct a character of the same age, Susan Weber, who accompanies Paul Brenner on his Vietnam odyssey.) He and his traveling companions were happy to oblige.

"It was just one of those beautiful nights, and the city was partying," he says. "We looked at each other and said, 'Do you believe we are here, back in Vietnam, with the sights and sounds and smells?' It was 29 years later. It was like something in a novel."

DeMille laughs at the last remark, knowing full well he has turned that reality, and his memories, into a literary journey. For 700 pages, he takes readers into the proverbial "Up Country," a term originally coined by the British to refer to a wild interior or land; in Vietnam, it became synonymous with the battle zones where Americans and Vietnamese lost their lives.

At the end of his literary trek — which seems half as long as its length — DeMille's work comes to a stunning, sudden conclusion. There's almost a feeling of disbelief, but in the context of this most problematic military venture, the denouement makes perfect sense.

"It was kind of an ambiguous ending," DeMille says. "But it was an ambiguous war."

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