Slicks

Synopsis

MARK BRADY is twenty years old and freshly winged when he lands at a dusty base in Vietnam. He’s not a hero. He’s not a coward. He’s exactly the kind of young American man the war manufactures in bulk - eager, uncertain, and about to have everything he thought he knew stripped away. His anchor is JJ, his co-pilot, his best friend, the kind of bond forged in the crucible of shared danger that most people never experience in a lifetime. Together they fly combat missions, skimming the canopy, taking fire, hauling broken men out of impossible places. It is terrifying. It is also, in the language of twenty-year-olds, the most alive either of them has ever felt. Back home, Brady’s girl JESSICA writes him a Dear John letter. The war takes everything, and then it takes that too. In the jungle, legendary correspondent LARRY BURROWS moves through the carnage with a camera, bearing witness to a war the world is watching but few truly understand — forcing Brady to see his own experience not just as survival, but as history. Then Brady learns what his helicopters are really carrying. The men he ferries into the dark aren’t prisoners. They’re targets. His missions are feeding Phoenix, the CIA’s covert program of interrogation and assassination, running quietly beneath the war everyone else can see. It is the kind of truth a man cannot unsee, and cannot un-know. Speak, and he becomes a threat to the most powerful men in the war. Stay silent, and he is complicit in it. The choice Brady makes will define every year of his life that follows.