Cruelty and abuse from his Southern past follow Jack "Half-Pint" Crowe into the Vietnam War. Two tours of combat inflict physical wounds and moral damage, but they also deliver the ministrations of a Navy corpsman named Frank-a holy being who reads mysterious books and befriends Jack, coaxing him inward toward his own wholeness. When Frank is killed in battle, an anguished Half-Pint removes three blood-stained books from Frank's shredded pack.

Those books and his vow of nonviolence carry the Marine home to the swampy borderland of Louisiana and Arkansas. In that summer of return, Half-Pint plunges back into the atmosphere of hell he had longed to escape for good. Hunted by the fanatical Calvin Whitehead after offering help to his wife and son, his vow of nonviolence is challenged in the murky swamplands of the Southern grotesque. He takes refuge in his new oil rig coworkers, a misfit cast of no-gooders on the verge of insanity brought on by the harsh conditions of their job and the undying meaninglessness of a life spent cheating death amid the pulse of true American blue collar work life.

It is through these folds we see the illumination of Half-Pint's evermoving quest for truth and meaning. Guided by Frank's bloodstained books, Half-Pint must shred all he knows to find the thing missing in all of us.