Franklin LeBaron Sharps is a young paratrooper sent to Vietnam in 1965 with the celebrated 101st Airborne Division-the Screaming Eagles. The great-grandson of Sergeant Major Augustus Sharps and the son of Brigadier General Samuel Sharps, a former Tuskegee Airman, Franklin fights a war on two fronts; in Vietnam, he is determined to repay the Viet Cong for their killing of his brother, and at home, he fights against his father's attempts to reconcile with the family he deserted. Drawing on his own experience as a paratrooper in Vietnam, Tom Willard takes a brutally graphic look at the war in its early years: a time when the United States was sorely divided and its military heroes suffered bravely both abroad and at home.