We live together under the thick canopy, each searching for the other, the same leeches and mosquitoes that feed on our blood feed on his blood." John Edmund Delezen felt a kinship with the people he was instructed to kill in Vietnam, they were all at the mercy of the land. Delezen writes of Vietnam as a man humbled by a mysterious country and horrified by acts of brutality. The land was his enemy as much as the Vietnamese soldiers. He vividly describes the three-canopy jungle with birds and monkeys overhead that could be heard but not seen, venomous snakes hiding in trees and relentless bugs that fed on men. He recalls stumbling onto a pit of rotting Vietnamese bodies left behind by American forces, and days when fierce hunger made a bag of plasma seem like an enticing meal. He writes of his fallen comrades and the images of war that still pervade his dreams.