Ever wonder what happened to the kid in high school who had a mohawk, wore a tattered American flag pinned upside down on his jacket, and espoused his political and social rhetoric-including peace - with little or no provocation? His name was Alex Fields and the answer is that he went to war.
When veteran of the peace punk movement, Alex Fields, was a hard-charged kid, full of piss and vinegar and intent on saving a world that didn't deserve saving from itself, the last thing in that world you could have gotten him to believe about his future was that one day, he would grow up and enlist as a chaplain's assistant in the Army and that his enlistment would take him to the front lines of a warzone in Iraq. But somehow, this is exactly what happened.
Having bought in, sold out, and given up on most of his old convictions, Alex finds himself a susceptible pawn to the expert art of military brainwashing. He comes to regard the great war films, which once filled him with sorrow and disgust, as his "war-porn" and he is taken aback to look inside himself and find that he is as savage as the next guy. He confides to readers: "I am the newest brother in the Order of Cain, Original Sin, Bloody Babylon. I have traveled thousands of miles to spill this blood in the Garden where nothing can grow. I am Brutality Incarnate. I am War and I am Death and I am Destruction. I am Plague and I am Pestilence and I am carried through this fiery world of pain in the belly of a great green beast. Judge, jury, and executioner . . . I am God, Alpha, and Omega . . . and I am the Devil himself. I haven't seen a trace of my own heart in months and I have forgotten how to miss it."
But when Alex is given a weeks leave to Germany, where he is sent as an escort with a soldier checking into the hospital for mental distress, he comes to question . . . well . . . everything; who he is and who he was and who he is afraid of becoming, his commitment to a war that he doesn't not believe in, and most of all the courage it takes - both to fight a war and to walk away from one.
Killing Fields is the almost true story of one man's struggle to find the right answers in a wrong war. Is there such thing as a right one?