For two decades Sympson thought little of his tour of duty as a Marine artillery officer in Vietnam. But recovering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer probably caused by exposure in Vietnam to Agent Orange, he saw a thread running through his later life and was flooded with memories of events he had never talked about. This book began as an exercise in self-therapy, an attempt to discharge the emotional burdens he had unknowingly carried for so many years.