A small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his father at an international airport, with only the clothes on his back and a handful of money jammed in his coat pocket. But to tell this story, this novel by the author of the National Book Award finalist The End travels back, decades earlier, to Vollie Frade enlisting in the Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. Breaking definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie sets in motion a chain of events which sees him go to work for insidious organization with intentions he cannot yet grasp. From the Cambodian jungle, to a flophouse in Queens, to a New Mexico commune, Vollie's path on the margins of America may lead to a terrible reckoning.