Operation Lancelot The Decker Diaries, Book 1 West Point forged him. Tokyo will test everything else. In 1948, Lieutenant Robert Decker arrives at General Douglas MacArthur's occupation headquarters in Tokyo on orders no one around him has seen - because no one around him is cleared to see them. Operation Lancelot is Presidential-eyes-only: place one man inside MacArthur's command, let him earn his way in, and report the truth. Whatever the official record says or doesn't say. His superior, Major Donald James Pruitt - brilliant, fiercely loyal, and furious at having an unknown quantity inserted without consultation - has no idea why Decker is there. He begins running Decker through tests of increasing difficulty and decreasing visibility. Decker passes every one.
And with each test, the weight of the secret grows heavier. When North Korea crosses the 38th Parallel in June 1950 and the Korean War erupts, Decker's position inside MacArthur's staff moves from strategic to critical. He watches General Willoughby shape intelligence to match MacArthur's expectations rather than battlefield reality. He writes reports that contradict the official record. He carries field truth into rooms where field truth is not welcome - and watches what happens when a command built on invincibility refuses to hear a warning it cannot afford to ignore. MacArthur marches toward the Yalu River. The Chinese signal is unmistakable. The command doesn't want it confirmed.
Operation Lancelot is the first volume of The Decker Diaries - a military thriller series spanning Robert Decker's career from 1948 to 1974. Grounded in the documented history of the Korean War, the MacArthur-Truman conflict, and the intelligence failures that cost thousands of lives, it is ultimately a story about two things no military manual addresses: what a man owes to his mentor, and what he owes to the truth - when those two things are not the same. For readers of The Forgotten Soldier*,* Matterhorn*, and* Once an Eagle.