Guard of Honor

Kennedy's ( Rules of Encounter ) powerful, crackling study of a conflict between duty and morality is set in a Green Beret training camp in the Appalachian foothills along the South Carolina/Georgia border. A would-be mass killer poisons the camp's drinking water, plants a grenade in a major's driveway and tortures a visiting Salvadoran colonel. The chief suspect is trainee Miguel Cortines, whose family was brutally murdered by U.S.-armed Salvadoran troops when he was a boy. Captain Robert Gordon, an idealistic Army lawyer, heads the investigation into the camp disturbances and later acts as Cortines's defense attorney at his dramatic court martial. In effect, Gordon puts the Army on trial, exposing its practice of tutoring right-wing Third World regimes in the use of torture, repression and terrorism. The cast of soldiers includes a quietly determined man from Iowa, a street-smart Harlem recruit, a sadistic sergeant and various foreign officers being schooled in counter-insurgency tactics, plus disenchanted wives. Kennedy spins an engrossing tale that sharply questions American support of dictators and police-state bullies around the globe. (July)