Dietz is a war correspondent embedded with the U.S. military in Saigon. He is furiously devoted to his work and writing letters to his children. They receive two or three every week, and Dietz often constructs elaborate storylines involving animal characters to tell them about the inordinately painful or pleasant parts of his life overseas. During the first few years, he has several love affairs and lots of friends, which helps him cope with the isolation and constant stream of death. In his correspondence, he takes an aggressively neutral stance toward the war because, he rationalizes, he has cut himself off from the U.S. Rather than merely describe the violence, its effects, or the course of the war, he uses irony, exact facts, and mathematically precise prose to focus on the whims and customs of those involved in the war. He is, as he puts it, more of a social historian than anything else. One April afternoon, he almost dies on a military expedition into Laos. While recovering in the hospital, he writes his story twice: once in animal terms for his children, and once as it actually happened for his newspaper, albeit without any specifics or facts. Afterward, his writing changes completely. Searching for the "still moral center" from which to observe the violence, he now rarely uses precise facts. Instead, he relies on imagery, invented events, and literary writing. After Puller, his friend, fails to convince him on a visit that he has lost touch, Dietz goes through his usual nighttime routine — he secures his room against attack, checks his weapons, readies his go-bag, and starts to write his children. Despite his bosses' insistence that he come home or be fired and his critics' insistence that he no longer understands the conflict, Dietz stays. He feels safe inside his unbiased moral fortress and, he thinks, is free of facts forever.