This book details a very different side of the war: the psychological affects. The premise is the massacre at My Lai and a fictional story that surrounds the suffering a soldier who partook in the massacre deals with. It highlights how hiding information never helps anyone—not the government or even people.

Hiding information served as the main poison to John Wade. The sounds, sights, and emotions were constantly recalled and were hard to repress. What he saw at My Lai forever changed his life. While the mind is a powerful tool that can, at will, alter memories, nothing ever leaves the mind. So when John would hear something, smell something, or see something that reminded him of Vietnam, it would recall all of the bad memories.

The author implemented powerful rhetorical tools: combining a fictional story with factual quotes serves to tie the two together. By offering a side-by-side comparison of the factual information with a fictional story allows the reader to draw a parallel between the two without the author having to do much work. Going even further, setting aside the facts by giving them their own paragraph, O’Brien distinguishes the story from the facts; but yet, by setting the facts apart, the author highlights them, making the reader take them as a whole, making sure not to skip over any fact.

There is no sense in jumping to conclusions about the main character John. Some may call him crazy, not sound, insane, but all of those assume John knew who he was (it also presumes that everyone has the same definition for every word). Many people suffer from PTSD, especially those who come back from combat and who have seen disturbing things; many can’t sleep at night due to insomnia; many suffer relationship troubles. The cause: War.

O’Brien successfully highlights the atrocities of war through a clever fictional tale about John Wade, his PTSD symptoms and flashbacks to Vietnam.