On the day of his son Gordon's death, Ernest searches his dorm room, where he himself had lived decades ago. Though Ernest is exhausted from sleeping pills, he begins to investigate the scene, hoping to find clues about his son's life in the months leading up to his death. As he searches, Ernest remembers his son in his graduation gown, grenade in hand. He continuously fights back the image, attempting to focus on the objects before him.

After the explosion, the Dean tried to calm Ernest, giving him sleeping pills and sending him to lie down in any empty dorm room. Ernest, however, knew he would soon be questioned by the police and wanted to prepare a story that would honor his son's name, so he snuck upstairs to the door room to gather evidence.

Ernest sees politically charged slogans around the room and assumes they belong to Carter, his son's former roommate, but he wonders why Gordon did not get rid of them after his roommate left months ago. As he finds more of Carter's things around the room, he realizes that his son had recently worn his friend's clothes and even slept in his bed. Ernest also finds letters from Carter to Gordon trying to get him involved in the political movements of the time, the late 60s. He even discovers that Gordon, who was at the top of his class and had been accepted into Harvard for graduate school, had plagiarized parts of his final project. When Ernest tries to picture his son's face, he begins to envision Carter's instead.

Reading through more of Gordon's letters, Ernest discovers that something Gordon had said to his roommate had caused Carter to run away. For a while, Carter traveled around the country, sending Gordon postcards from his trip. However, a couple months later, Carter was shipped off to Vietnam. His letters from overseas were vastly different than his others. Carter describes violent war scenes and claims that the war is necessary, explaining that he had been wrong all along. Then, in a letter from only three days ago, Carter's parents write to Gordon that their son has been reported missing in action.

Still unsure of his son's ultimate motivation for his death, Ernest is at least determined to get rid of the disturbing evidence he has found. He shoves posters and letters into a box and drives through the woods and to the dump. Ernest drags the boxes into the dump and tries to light them on fire. He then sees the beam of a flashlight and notices someone nearby chasing a rat.