In Anchorage, Alaska, Richie Perry watches a soldier named Harold Gates (later, Perry will learn the soldier goes by “Peewee”) brag about how many “Congs” he plans to kill when he arrives in Vietnam. It’s September 1967. At only 17, Perry joined the army as soon as he graduated from high school. He’s a poor Black kid from Harlem and his family—Mama and his little brother, Kenny—relies on him for support. He can’t afford to go to college, despite his intellectual talent and good grades.
In Vietnam, Perry is assigned to a combat unit. Although a knee injury should keep him off the front lines, his medical profile hasn’t arrived yet. Not wanting to complain, he decides to tough it out until the paperwork arrives. Along with Peewee and two other soldiers, Johnson and Jenkins, he finds himself assigned to a squad deep in the Vietnamese countryside. Under the command of Sergeant Simpson, in includes Corporals Brunner and Lobel and Privates Brewster, Monaco, and Walowick. Coming back from their very first patrol, Jenkins steps on a landmine and dies.
Over the following weeks, Perry gets to know his squad mates better and his friendship with Peewee deepens. The squad goes on pacification missions and jungle patrols. Filling in on a different squad, Perry witnesses a tragic episode when a nervous officer mistakes American soldiers for Vietcong fighters and calls in an artillery attack on them. When the platoon’s deeply loved and respected Lieutenant Carroll dies of injuries sustained on a mission, Alpha Company’s captain, Stewart, asks Perry to write a letter to Mrs. Carroll explaining the circumstances.
Lieutenant Gearhart replaces Lieutenant Carroll just before the beginning of 1968. Early in the year, Vietcong fighters launch a coordinated attack on targets across the south, bringing the war to a new and more intense phase. Perry kills his first man while occupying a Vietcong-controlled village. As the fighting increases, Alpha Company receives orders to move further into the countryside. The squad learns that Captain Stewart has been volunteering them for extra and dangerous missions to curry favor and earn his promotion faster. On one of these missions, Brewster dies, and Perry receives serious injuries. He’s briefly sent to the hospital at Chu Lai to recover, but quickly rejoins the squad on the front lines. He arrives to find that Sergeant Simpson’s tour has ended. An openly racist man, Sergeant Dongan, replaces him.
The squad participates in a disastrous joint mission with ARVN forces; so many soldiers die—including Sergeant Dongan—that the survivors can’t evacuate their bodies. Instead, the survivors burn the bodies in a hasty battlefield burial. As the rescue helicopters arrive, the ARVN and American forces turn on each other in their desperation to escape first.
A few days later, Peewee and Perry become separated from the rest of the squad on a reconnaissance mission. Believing their friends to be dead, they shelter for the night in a Vietcong “spider hole,” then narrowly escape—rescuing Monaco in the process—the next morning. Their injuries send them all to the hospital at Chu Lai, where Peewee and Perry both receive medical discharges. Monaco must return to the fighting once more. As Perry and Peewee board a plane bound for California, Perry feels the war recede in the distance, but he knows that Vietnam, the squad, and the dead will never fade from his memory.
