Portrait of the assassin as a young man

Special article on Barry Eisler’s latest thriller, “Graveyard of Memories”: Japan Times

Sometime in the 1970s, as more Americans began to rally against the Vietnam War, an unknown cynic parodied the U.S. Army’s promotional recruitment tagline with the slogan, “Join the Army! Travel to unusual places. Meet interesting people, and kill them.”

The killing part, at least, pretty much describes how John Rain, author Barry Eisler’s fictional half-Japanese, half-American assassin for hire, spent his time in Vietnam, on joint military-CIA missions run by a clandestine outfit called the Studies and Observation Group (SOG).