Shy, naive nineteen year-old Griffin returns one night from the insurance office where he works to his parent's home in the suburbs where he still lives, to discover that he has been drafted. Against the odds, he survives induction into the army where fierce sergeants set about transforming him into their version of a man-without a great deal of success. But he learns what he needs to know pretty quickly once they land him as a combat soldier in the Vietnam war. Faced with the worst horrors of human conflict, Griffin transforms into the most fundamental of humans-hunter-killer-the quintessential example of the most dangerous predatory animal ever to walk this planet. And then, just as suddenly, his time is up and he is dumped back into civilised society and expected to cope. Unable to resume any part of his former comfortable, happy existence, he sets about trying to be someone else-without much luck-until he falls in with radical draft-dodger Lew Sigg. Painfully, Griffin undergoes a 180 turn and becomes an anti-war protestor, more or less, but it solves nothing. Finally Lew, on the run from the law, takes him on a journey that will finally bring him to terms with himself.