Uncertain of his future goals, seventeen-year-old Richie
Perry, a black high school graduate from Harlem, travels to Vietnam
to fight in the United States Army. When Richie leaves basic training
for Vietnam, he harbors a host of illusions about the war and the
army. He confidently believes that the medical profile he has received
for a knee injury will be properly processed and prevent him from
engaging in combat. He also believes in the flurry of rumors about
imminent peace and in the prevalent romantic myths about warfare.
When Richie first arrives in Vietnam, he befriends Harold
“Peewee” Gates and Jenkins, two new recruits assigned to the same squad.
A sergeant assures them that they should encounter only easy, light
work, as there is not much fighting near Chu Lai, where their company
is stationed. These rumors prove to be wishful thinking, however,
when the three new soldiers arrive at their camp; Jenkins is killed
by a land mine during the squad’s first patrol. Richie is deeply
shaken and longs to communicate his terror and horror to his family,
but he finds himself unable to write the truth to his mother and
his brother, Kenny.
As Richie witnesses ever-increasing levels of destruction
and brutality, he begins to doubt whether there is any straightforward morality
in war. He sees that the line between good and bad is often ambiguous.
He also becomes disillusioned with the selfishness of his commanding
officers, particularly the company commander, Captain Stewart, who
is more concerned with earning a promotion than he is with the safety
of the soldiers under his command. When Richie’s platoon leader,
Lieutenant Carroll, is killed during a combat mission, Richie begins
a serious search for answers to why he and his fellow soldiers are
even fighting in Vietnam in the first place. Though his friends
insist that such thoughts are futile and dangerous, Richie feels
compelled to find meaning within the chaos. He also longs for some
way to communicate his confused thoughts and emotions to his family,
but he remains unable to do so. Richie is not sure how to sort out
the emotions he feels or how to communicate them effectively to
civilians who have never seen combat.
As Richie searches for meaning in the war, he also searches
for his own sense of self. He struggles to unravel his motivations
for enlisting in the army, wondering whether his reason was a selfless
one, based on the desire to earn money to provide for Kenny, or
a selfish one—simply to escape from the hard life he faced in Harlem.
Richie also forces himself to confront the uncomfortable question
of what he will do when he returns to civilian life. Though he is
highly intelligent and highly motivated and has ambitions to become
a writer, his family is too poor to send him to college. Richie’s
father abandoned the family years ago, and his mother has since
become an alcoholic. Richie is afraid that without an education
he has no career potential, and he is unsure what he has to look
forward to if he survives.
Richie is wounded in a battle and transferred to a hospital.
During the peaceful weeks spent recuperating, he begins to remember the
joys of safety and gains a new sense of the horrors of war. When he
is declared healthy and ordered to rejoin his unit, he wonders how
he can possibly go back into combat and considers deserting the
army. In the end, though, he rejoins his unit as ordered.
Back with his unit, Richie learns that the old squad leader,
Sergeant Simpson, has been sent home. His replacement is the racist Sergeant
Dongan, who always places black soldiers in the most dangerous positions.
Early in their tour of duty, there are racial and ethnic tensions
among the squad members, which frequently result in physical confrontations.
As the squad’s bond grows stronger, however, petty prejudices begin
to fade, and the squad bands together against Dongan’s racism. Soon,
Dongan is killed, and the squad is placed under the command of one
of its own soldiers, Corporal Brunner.
Brunner leads the men on a deadly mission to track down
a group of Vietcong—North Vietnamese guerilla forces—along a river. After
a series of mistakes and miscalculations, a firefight breaks out, leaving
both Richie and Peewee wounded. Richie’s medical profile is finally
processed while he is recovering, and Peewee’s wounds are serious
enough to earn him a discharge from the army. Peewee and Richie
fly home on the same plane, along with caskets containing dead soldiers.
They try to stand tall for the new recruits, who are just arriving
in Vietnam.
