The story shows how a group of senior NCOs called Old Soldiers or lifers by the men that served under them used a communication system to barter their way to a soft life in a combat zone. From the leader of the Old Soldiers, Chief Master Sergeant O'Toole to the Vietnamese woman Fat Mae Ree in charge of the entertainment for the base, the plot takes the reader from fiction to real life and how a young Vietnamese teaches the Old Soldiers how to be conned.