Gerald McCarthy enlisted in the Marines at 17 and volunteered for Vietnam. After the war he went AWOL, then to civilian jails and military brigs and finally to a Navy psychiatric ward, where he witnessed patient-attempted suicides. Medically discharged, he returned home to upstate New York and piecework in shoe factories. Written in two voices--one lucid, one dreamlike--his memoir delivers a jump-cut narrative of his troubled adolescence, his wartime experiences and his struggle to come unstuck from his own life.