The Phantom Blooper
Gustav Hasford
 The novel begins sometime after The Short-Timers left off and is divided into three parts. In "The Winter Soldiers", Joker (having been demoted from Sergeant to Private) is still at the Khe Sanh base, which is about to be abandoned by American Marines after withstanding a two-month siege. He believes most of his previous squad-mates are dead, even the seemingly indestructible Animal Mother. Joker blames their deaths on "The Phantom Blooper", supposedly an American, armed with an M79 grenade launcher, who fights alongside the Viet Cong against his countrymen. Joker is still haunted by the memory of his friend Cowboy, whom he killed in order to keep his squad from being cut down by a sniper. As a result, his behavior has become increasingly erratic and violent. He sets up one of his squad-mates to be killed in an attempt to draw the Phantom Blooper out of hiding, then forces an inattentive soldier on guard duty to hold a live hand grenade with the pin out. Later, as the Viet Cong attempt to overrun the base, he splits his platoon sergeant's tongue with a straight razor. The Marines turn back the attack, suffering heavy losses in the process. The next night, Joker ventures out in search of the Phantom Blooper, but is wounded and captured by the enemy. "Travels With Charlie" begins over a year later. Joker has been living and working in a small Viet Cong village, waiting for a chance to escape. He has not been tortured or sent to a POW camp, and his captors have begun to trust him to some degree. In Joker's mind, his best chance is to fool them into believing that he has converted to their cause, accompany them on an attack against an American position, then make his escape when the shooting starts. As time passes, however, he genuinely begins to side more and more with the Viet Cong, seeing them - the people he has been trained to kill - as ordinary human beings just like himself. When a team of Army soldiers arrives to rescue him, he is wounded in the ensuing firefight but manages to shoot down one of their choppers with a discarded M79 before passing out. In "The Proud Flesh", Joker spends time convalescing and undergoing psychiatric therapy at Yokosuka Naval Hospital in Japan. He quickly makes it clear that he does not regret any of his actions as a Viet Cong captive, and he expresses his disgust and outrage at having been sent by his country to fight in a futile war. Despite threats of a court-martial for treason, he is given a Section 8 discharge and sent home to the United States. Upon arriving in California, Joker finds that his squad radioman, Donlon, is alive and well and has become an antiwar protester. (Animal Mother, he also learns, was captured by the Viet Cong but escaped from a POW camp; he is still an active Marine.) They attend a demonstration that is quickly and forcefully broken up by the police, but Joker manages to slip away with the help of a cop who served with him at Khe Sanh. Next, Joker travels to Kansas, Cowboy's home, and has a brief and uneasy meeting with Cowboy's parents. Their son's body was never recovered from the jungle, and Joker does not tell them that he fired the shot that killed Cowboy. Finally, he reaches the family farm in Alabama, his disillusionment with the war and America growing all the time. Realizing at last that there is nothing left for him here, he sets out to return to Vietnam and his life among the Viet Cong villagers.