Perry meets Harold 'Peewee' Gates in an Anchorage airport while both wait for their plane to refuel en route to Vietnam.

Perry arrives in Vietnam and is assigned to Alpha Company in Chu Lai despite his unprocessed medical profile exempting him from combat.

Jenkins steps on a landmine during the squad's first night patrol and dies in front of Perry.

Lieutenant Carroll leads the squad in prayer for Jenkins, explaining that soldiers are called 'angel warriors' because so many die young.

Sergeant Simpson warns Perry and Peewee that Captain Stewart is sending them on more dangerous missions to inflate his enemy body count and earn a promotion.

Perry joins a Charlie Company patrol where a lieutenant accidentally calls in a white phosphorus artillery strike on his own platoon, killing over twelve American soldiers.

Perry's squad sets up an ambush against Viet Cong soldiers who had attacked Echo Company, and a chaotic firefight erupts in the dark.

Lieutenant Carroll is shot during the ambush and dies of his wounds at a hospital in Chu Lai.

Perry is shot twice and Brew is fatally wounded during a large-scale patrol up a jungle hill.

Brew dies on the evacuation helicopter while holding Perry's hand as medics stop working on him.

Perry returns to his squad and learns that the new sergeant, Dongan, has been placing Black soldiers in the most dangerous patrol positions.

A Vietnamese woman brings her child to the American camp, and the child explodes in a soldier's arms, killing him.

Brunner leads the squad into a firefight near a river and Peewee and Perry are cut off from the rest of the group in the chaos.

Perry and Peewee hide overnight in a spider hole as an entire North Vietnamese battalion searches the surrounding area for them.

Perry and Peewee board a plane home and watch new soldiers enter Vietnam while caskets of the dead are loaded alongside them.

Richie Perry enlists in the army and travels to Vietnam, where he is placed into active combat despite an unprocessed medical profile that should have kept him off the battlefield. Within days of arriving, Perry witnesses the sudden death of a fellow soldier and begins to understand that war is nothing like the heroic stories he had imagined. As the squad endures increasingly dangerous missions ordered by the promotion-hungry Captain Stewart, their beloved platoon leader Lieutenant Carroll is killed, leaving the men shaken and disillusioned. Perry is eventually wounded in battle and loses his close friend Brew, forcing him to confront the true human cost of the war during a quiet recovery period. After returning to his squad and navigating the racism of a new sergeant, Perry and Peewee are separated from their unit in a desperate overnight ordeal before finally securing their discharge and boarding a plane home.

The central journey from Harlem to Vietnam and back.

Perry and his unit are stranded overnight in an Osaka airport due to a bureaucratic error and are forced to pay for their own meals.

Perry and Peewee seal their friendship with a spit-and-handshake pact just before boarding a truck to their new squad.

Perry asks his commanding officer about his medical profile exempting him from combat, but the officer says it has not arrived.

Perry's squad goes on a public relations mission to a Vietnamese village, handing out food and befriending a young girl named An Linh.

During a patrol with a television film crew, Perry discovers mid-firefight that he forgot to load his weapon.

Perry asks Lieutenant Carroll for permission to mail a knife to his brother Kenny; Carroll gives him an embroidered silk jacket to send instead.

Perry sees Brew praying beside his bunk one sleepless night and asks Brew if he can teach him the Lord's Prayer and borrow his Bible.

Alpha Company is rewarded for their performance in the ambush mission with promotions, elevating Lobel and Brunner to the rank of sergeant.

The squad watches their recorded television interview air on a base TV set, and Perry is shaken by how much older he looks.

Lieutenant Gearhart arrives at the squad as a replacement platoon leader, having been in Vietnam for only two months.

Monaco receives a letter from his girlfriend proposing marriage, and the entire squad votes in favor of him accepting her proposal.

A doctor at the recovery hospital reads Perry's long-overdue medical profile and informs him he is being sent home with a second Purple Heart.

Every member of Perry's squad refuses Lieutenant Gearhart's request to transfer some of them to another squad to even out troop numbers.

Perry bribes a personnel sergeant to find Judy Duncan and is told that she was killed when her hospital was bombed.

Peewee persuades a lieutenant on the plane home to let him fly all the way to Harlem on the same flight as Perry.

While the main battles define Perry's war experience, a series of smaller but significant events reveal the human texture of life in Vietnam. From bureaucratic blunders before the fighting even begins to quiet moments of friendship, faith, and dark humor, these events show how the soldiers cope with the relentless pressure around them. The squad forms deep bonds through shared routines, letters from home, and gallows humor, even as new leadership and shifting circumstances test their cohesion. Secondary characters like Lobel, Brew, Monaco, and Monroe gain dimension through their own subplots involving love, loyalty, and survival. The pool ends, like the novel itself, with Perry and Peewee finally making their way home after the war has reshaped them both.

Behind-the-scenes moments that shaped the soldiers' bonds and daily lives.

A veteran soldier tells Perry and Peewee that peace talks in Paris mean the war will end soon, and Perry writes to his brother that there will be no more fighting.

Lieutenant Carroll privately offers to pull Perry from combat duty because of his knee injury, but Perry chooses to stay with his squad.

Lobel tells Perry during foxhole guard duty that he copes with the war by imagining himself as an actor who cannot be killed while delivering a monologue.

Jamal tells Perry that Captain Stewart officially reported three Viet Cong soldiers killed after a patrol where only one was actually killed.

Perry writes a carefully worded letter to Lieutenant Carroll's wife describing Carroll's death as brave, withholding the true horror of what happened.

Johnson tells Perry during a quiet moment at the base that there is no good guy in the war and no deeper meaning to search for.

The North Vietnamese Army violates the Tet ceasefire and launches coordinated attacks across South Vietnam, ending the squad's hopes of going home.

Lieutenant Gearhart fires a flare that exposes the squad's position during an interdiction patrol, and Turner is shot and killed during the resulting firefight.

Perry enters a burning hut at a massacred village, is ambushed by a Viet Cong soldier whose rifle misfires, and shoots the soldier point blank in the face.

Perry breaks down crying after killing the Viet Cong soldier, and Peewee climbs into his bunk and holds him until they both fall asleep.

Perry is awarded a Purple Heart medal at the recovery hospital and decides to send it home to his younger brother Kenny.

Perry seriously considers deserting and going AWOL while recovering at the hospital, but ultimately boards a plane back to his squad.

Sergeant Dongan is killed during combat while the squad fights to retake a strategically important hill.

Johnson fires his machine gun at Captain Stewart's feet to force the captain to back away from Peewee after Stewart pulls a gun on him.

Perry and Peewee hold hands all the way back to the United States on the plane home, unable to fully believe they survived the war.

Perry arrives in Vietnam holding onto optimistic myths about heroism and the near-certain end of the war, but a series of revelations steadily strip those illusions away. Each turning point forces Perry to confront a harder truth — about the war's moral ambiguity, the corruption of his commanders, and the cost of survival. The death of Lieutenant Carroll and Perry's own first kill mark the deepest breaks in his sense of self, pushing him toward crisis before a period of recovery forces him to decide whether to fight on. Racial injustice, personal grief, and a near-death experience in a spider hole complete his transformation. By the novel's end, Perry is no longer the confused teenager who enlisted, but a young man who has earned a painful and irreversible understanding of what war actually is.