When LCDR Pete Brauer, former U.S. Navy SEAL (retired), dies in Florida, he dies clutching in his hands the portrait of a beautiful French-Vietnamese girl that has hung on his wall for more than twenty years.
I will never forgive myself, Pollack, Brauer told his neighbor and friend, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jack Kazmarek (retired). I dont think God will either.
Weve all done things, Kazmarek replied. Especially in Vietnam.
We havent all done what I done.
After Petes death, Kazmarek sets out on a quest to discover the relationship between Pete and the Eurasian girl in the photograph, Mhai, and to lay to rest the demons which haunted his friend throughout his life. The quest leads him back to Vietnam, a return that many combat veterans of Vietnam are making to old battlefields and old memories.
In the process of uncovering details of the romance between a Navy SEAL fighting in the Mekong Delta and the beautiful enemy he wounds and captures, Kazmarek must confront personal demons that he has also attempted to suppress since TET 1968 and the fighting that erupted around the VC village of Vain Tho. Although their paths had not crossed in Vietnam, the Navy SEAL Brauer and the army infantry platoon leader Kazmarek had fought in the same area of operations, against the same warlord of the Delta, the mysterious Commander Minh.
Kazmarek finds himself re-living old nightmares of the horrors of war in Vietnam. Drawn inexorably back to Vain Tho and to what occurred there over three decades previously, he finds that his path and Petes must have crossed after all--in Vain Tho during a battle in which both men had done things. He finds himself not only confronting the past, but also reenacting it when Commander Minh, now also an old man, emerges to even the score.