A young homeless teenager struggles to find his way in life while facing the reputations of criminal and abusive relatives. With no healthy experiences to go by, he finds his way to a home in the U.S. Navy. He paths his life with purpose in the medical field as a corpsman. His struggles take him to Vietnam with the U.S. Marine Corps as a combat medic and addresses his pain and misery of wounded and dying marines with his combat poetry. His constant fear of not being able to do enough to aid the wounded are evident in both his story and in real life. His grip with fear and death, expressed in prose, have been his personal return from the hell of post traumatic stress. He gives no glorification for war and takes his God serious without reservation. He claims his actions to be no different in combat then all corpsmen so charged with tending the wounded and giving last rites to the marines who couldn't be saved. As written in one of his poems; he states that his scars from wounds are a reminder that what happened was real. His life story is the vehicle for his prose.