Rodney Falk did not want to go to Vietnam in 1967. He was a thoughtful young American, a dedicated protester against the war, yet when his draft notice arrived, try as he might, he could find no honourable way out. Two years later he returned home traumatised and haunted. Something had happened in Vietnam, something so terrible that he could hardly live with the memory.
In 1987 the narrator, an aspiring young writer from provincial Spain, begins work as a teaching assistant on a Midwestern campus and finds himself sharing an office with Rodney Flak. By now Rodney is a taciturn man of strange ways and few friends, but after an inauspicious start he and the narrator becomes obsessed with discovering the secrets of his past.
Who do people fear Rodney? Why did he befriend the narrator? Above all, what happened at My Khe? And why, when the narrator's life takes a terrible twist, is Rodney the only person in the world who can save him? - Book cover.

Translated from the Spanish.