Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Vietcong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated.

When a medic finally rescues him almost two days later, Paco is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the United States with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next.

One evening, on the tail of a rainstorm, he limps off a bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real job and a real bed, but no matter how hard he works, nothing muffles the anguish in his mind and body.

Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco's Story plunges the reader into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.