America is embroiled in a war in Viet Nam. Daniel Gershom and four other members of his New York City Army Reserve unit are sent to a post in western Louisiana for Basic Combat Training. Passing through the gates of Fort Polk the young men enter into an exotic world in which the cadre speaks its own language and follows its own ways.

As the narrative of Gershom suggests, each sojourn through the Army's world is unique and different; and yet they are, at the same time, somehow all the same.

So it was, Gershom suggests, for the men who made the sojourn before Danny and his buddies; and so it will be, the tale implies, for all of those who will follow behind.