Chapter 1 Summary

At the tender age of twenty, Caputo enlists in the Marine Corps in the hopes to end his dreary days of comfortable living in a small, mid-western suburban town. He enters the war with romantic notions of being a hero, with thoughts of ending the war within a few short weeks or months and returning home to a parade of patriotic countrymen that will slap him on the back and ask him to tell them another heroic tale of his adventures in Vietnam. What he finds, however, is a rude awakening to the realities of a battle fought in the middle of the jungle with Viet Cong who refuse to play by the rules he has learned in his military training. In the thick of the jungle, Caputo learns the reality of war, while he comes to understand himself, as least as much...