Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries love letters from Martha and obsesses over her while leading Alpha Company through Vietnam.

Ted Lavender is shot and killed while Lieutenant Cross daydreams about Martha instead of watching his men.

After Lavender's death, Alpha Company burns the village of Than Khe and shoots all the chickens and dogs.

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross burns Martha's letters and photographs and resolves to be a harder, more disciplined commander.

The narrator receives his military draft notice and begins seriously considering fleeing across the border to Canada.

The narrator drives north and spends several days at Elroy Berdahl's Tip Top Lodge near the Rainy River.

Elroy steers the narrator's fishing boat across the Rainy River into Canadian waters without saying a word.

The narrator chooses not to swim to Canada and accepts that he will go to the war.

Curt Lemon steps from shade into sunlight during a grenade game with Rat Kiley and is killed in the explosion.

After Curt Lemon's death, Rat Kiley tortures a baby water buffalo by shooting it methodically until it collapses.

The narrator automatically throws a grenade at a young Vietnamese soldier walking along a trail near My Khe.

Kiowa sinks into a flooded muck field near the Song Tra Bong River and drowns during a mortar attack.

The morning after Kiowa dies, soldiers wade through rain and muck to search for and recover his body.

The narrator returns to the Vietnamese field where Kiowa died and buries Kiowa's moccasins in the river.

The narrator reflects that storytelling keeps the dead alive, imagining his childhood love Linda still living inside his stories.

Alpha Company soldiers carry both physical and emotional burdens through the jungles of Vietnam, led by Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, who is haunted by his love for a woman named Martha. When Ted Lavender is shot dead while Cross daydreams, Cross burns her letters and resolves to become a harder soldier. The narrator faces a crisis of conscience when he is drafted, briefly fleeing toward the Canadian border before choosing to go to war out of fear of social shame. In Vietnam, soldiers die in brutal ways—Curt Lemon killed in a sunlit grenade accident, Kiowa drowning in a muck-filled field—and the survivors are left carrying the weight of those losses. The narrator kills a young Vietnamese soldier and is haunted by the act for decades, while the company endures the full psychological toll of the war. Decades later, the narrator returns to Vietnam with his daughter and ultimately finds that storytelling itself is the only way to keep the dead alive.

The central story of war, guilt, and survival in Vietnam.

Jimmy Cross visits the narrator in Massachusetts after the war, and they drink gin and look at old war photographs.

Jimmy Cross reveals he burned Martha's original photo but received a new one from Martha at a college reunion.

Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk get into a fistfight over a missing jackknife, and Jensen repeatedly breaks Strunk's nose.

To settle his guilt over the fight, Dave Jensen uses a pistol to break his own nose.

Lee Strunk steps on a mortar round and loses his right leg, begging Dave Jensen not to kill him.

Curt Lemon faints from fear during a routine dental exam, then sneaks back to demand the dentist pull a healthy tooth.

Mark Fossie arranges for his teenage girlfriend Mary Anne to fly from Cleveland to his Vietnam outpost on a supply helicopter.

Mary Anne slips away at night to go on combat ambushes with the Green Berets without telling Mark Fossie.

Mark Fossie finds Mary Anne inside the Special Forces hootch by candlelight, wearing a necklace made of human tongues.

Mary Anne walks alone into the Vietnamese mountains one morning and is never found or heard from again.

Henry Dobbins keeps wearing his ex-girlfriend's pantyhose around his neck for luck even after she breaks up with him.

Alpha Company shelters at an abandoned pagoda where two monks tend the grounds and clean Dobbins's machine gun.

A young girl dances barefoot in the ashes of her burned village while soldiers discover her dead family inside.

Henry Dobbins lifts Azar off the ground and threatens to drop him into a well for mocking the dancing girl.

Norman Bowker pulls into an A&W drive-in at dusk and nearly tells the intercom cashier about the war before going silent.

Long after the war, Jimmy Cross visits the narrator and reveals he still carries his love for Martha, though she never returned it, and that he kept a new photo of her even after burning the first. Within the company, small conflicts escalate into strange rituals of guilt and loyalty, as when Dave Jensen breaks his own nose to square things with Lee Strunk after a fistfight, and the two later bind themselves in a grim life-or-death pact. Mary Anne Bell's transformation from a cheerful teenage girlfriend into a feral presence of the jungle illustrates how completely Vietnam could consume a person's identity. Meanwhile, smaller moments of humanity and absurdity emerge—Curt Lemon demanding a perfectly healthy tooth be pulled to restore his wounded pride, two monks peacefully cleaning a machine gun, a girl dancing alone in the ruins of her burned home. Norman Bowker's silent drive around a lake, culminating in an almost-confession to a fast-food intercom cashier, captures how the inability to speak about the war left some soldiers trapped in an endless loop of memory.

The secondary characters and relationships that shaped the war experience.

The narrator snaps while working on a Minnesota pig-packing line and impulsively drives north toward the Canadian border.

Elroy Berdahl gives the narrator lodge chores, calculates wages owed, and slips cash in an envelope labeled Emergency Fund.

Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk sign a formal contract agreeing to kill each other if either is critically wounded.

Rat Kiley writes a heartfelt letter to Curt Lemon's sister after Lemon's death, but she never writes back.

Mitchell Sanders admits to the narrator that he invented some details of the mountain music story but insists the story is still true.

The narrator stares silently at the Vietnamese soldier he has just killed on the trail while Kiowa urges him to stop and talk.

The narrator's daughter asks if he has ever killed anyone, and he tells her of course not.

Norman Bowker drives in loops around his hometown lake after the war, imagining conversations he cannot bring himself to start.

On the Fourth of July, Norman Bowker wades fully clothed into the lake and submerges his head under the water.

The narrator receives a letter from Norman Bowker asking him to write a story about a soldier who cannot readjust to civilian life.

The narrator reveals that Norman Bowker hanged himself at a YMCA three years after sending that letter.

The narrator confesses he invented the killing in Ambush and that his only factual truth is having been present in Vietnam.

Bobby Jorgenson fails to treat the narrator's gunshot wound for shock, causing a near-gangrenous infection that hospitalizes him.

The narrator and Azar stage a nighttime scare at Jorgenson's guard post, but Jorgenson calmly identifies the narrator by name.

Rat Kiley shoots himself in the foot during a stretch of nighttime marches to escape his psychological breakdown.

Before going to war, the narrator faces a defining moral crisis—driven north toward Canada by an impulse he cannot fully explain—until an old man's quiet generosity at a riverside lodge, including wages left in an envelope, leaves him confronting his own cowardice. Inside the war, key turning points arrive in quiet forms: a mutual kill-pact between friends, a letter to a dead man's sister that goes unanswered, and the narrator's paralyzed silence in front of a man he has just killed. Norman Bowker's failure to speak about his wartime experiences—driving in circles, wading into a lake, refusing to confide in a stranger—leads directly to his suicide years later, while the narrator credits his own survival to the act of writing stories. The collection's final movements reveal that even the narrator's most vivid accounts are invented, and that story-truth and happening-truth are not the same thing. Rat Kiley's self-inflicted wound and Bobby Jorgenson's medical failure close the war's psychological arc, making clear that the damage of Vietnam could not be undone, only carried forward.

The private decisions, discoveries, and emotional shifts that define the collection.