The Nightingale's Song is a 1995 book by Baltimore Sun journalist Robert Timberg. It relates the military and political careers of five graduates of the United States Naval Academy, most of whom served during the Vietnam War in either the United States Navy or United States Marine Corps: John McCain, Bud McFarlane, Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Jim Webb. Timberg himself was also a Naval Academy graduate and served in Vietnam with the Marine ...
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The Nightingale's Song is a 1995 book by Baltimore Sun journalist Robert Timberg. It relates the military and political careers of five graduates of the United States Naval Academy, most of whom served during the Vietnam War in either the United States Navy or United States Marine Corps: John McCain, Bud McFarlane, Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Jim Webb. Timberg himself was also a Naval Academy graduate and served in Vietnam with the Marine Corps, where he was badly wounded.
The book examines how both the Annapolis and the Vietnam experiences shaped the different characters portrayed, and how it foreshadowed their political careers, and for some, their involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.
The Nightingale's Song received generally strong reviews, with Geoffrey Norman in American Way stating that the individual narratives taken collectively "become something greater than the sum of their parts. They take the reader on an odyssey across some of the hardest terrain of recent...
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