The novel begins with the statement, “It was a bad time” (1) and lists the men who have died: Billy Boy Watkins, Frenchie Tucker, Bernie Lynn, Lieutenant Sidney Martin, Pederson, Rudy Chassler, Buff, and Ready Mix. The rain is constant, filling the foxholes, ruining the ammunition, and causing fungus to grow on the men’s feet. Their new lieutenant, Lieutenant Corson, has dysentery. Vaught scraped diseased skin off his arm with his bayonet, and infection set in; he was pulled out of the war and lost his arm. Ben Nystrom shot himself in the foot. The men joke about all of these things.

In October, Doc Peret tells Lieutenant Corson that Cacciato has gone, after telling Paul Berlin that he was going to Paris. The lieutenant lies in his underwear smoking a joint; he’s old and ill—he should have been a major, but “whiskey and the fourteen dull years between Korea and Vietnam had ended all that” (2). Eventually he sits up and begins to think about what to do.

The lieutenant asks Paul—who he thinks is Vaught—what Cacciato is doing. Paul tells him Cacciato is planning to walk the 8,600 miles to Paris.