Ira Holloway's desire for intimacy comes early. He establishes a special emotional tie to Karen Granger when he is ten years old, because he looked at her feet in the X-ray machine in his uncle's shoe store. His need for attention prompts him, in high school, to sneak into the girls' rest room and scribble praise of his supposed sexual prowess on the walls of toilet stalls.

In Vietnam, because he was fluent in Vietnamese, he recognized that while another American serviceman assumed the prostitute with him was exclaiming in ecstasy at appropriate times in their conjugal moments, the woman was actually calling out "You pig!" and other, even less complimentary epithets. Ira Holloway's name presents a challenge to native speakers of Vietnamese, so the women at the sex shop or steam bath he frequents call him Mr. "Ai" which, with a rising tone, means "love" in Vietnamese...