Chapter one is in present setting, where Lt. McDonough is going back home and although we have our prior knowledge on the Vietnam war, we do not know how much he has been through – we only know that many of his brothers have died. He then has a small encounter with a major who turns out to be a psychiatrist that asks him ignorant questions that seemed to quite bother him – however, he maintained military and professional bearing even after going through all traumatic experiences which personally for me, if I was Lt. McDonough, I would have somehow gave the major a smart ass comment.

Going into chapter two, it is a flashback to the beginning of his journey where he talks about moving successfully through his senior year in high school and was wondering how he was going to afford college. As the news of Vietnam have grown more in local papers – how the United States was in the talks of sending American units over there, it has brought to his idea of getting an appointment at West Point. He ends up going to West Point, suffering for those four years, graduating, marrying the love of his life and then being sent off to Vietnam. And according to him, he felt that he was finally prepared now that they were sending him off but he was EXTREMELY naive.

Fast-forwarding him getting to Vietnam, he has very inconsistent encounters. But one that stood out to me was the lieutenant he spoke to when he got to the 173d Airborne Brigade. The things that the lieutenant was saying, they way that he expressed them, his character description just illustrated the disturbing events that occurred in Vietnam. Lt. McDonough was a little taken back by his encounter with the lieutenant because it made him realize that everything that he thought he was prepared for was not quite what he needed to prepare for.

The military can prepare me tactically and physically but I do not think they can prepare me for what is to come [mentally]. I think mental strength is strengthened through self-development because I do not think that you can teach someone to be tough mentally because war is not like a sports play – one cannot draw something up and expect it to go well, maybe on rare occasions. But a leader cannot prepare for these type of moments, so it is all about how well he or she is able to handle it [their mental strength]. The army prepares us for hypotheticals, but later in life, it is up to the future leaders to figure things out and adapt to the situations that we’re in.

Lt. McDonough knew what was going on in Vietnam through local papers regarding the statistics of death while at West Point but he did not know, until his encounter with the lieutenant, that what he read in the newspapers back in the U.S., will be the statistics that he will get to witness firsthand which had given him his first sense of reality.