Follows "Swoff, " a third-generation Marine enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back through the Middle East deserts. There is no cover from intolerable heat or from the Iraqi soldiers, who are always potentially just over the next horizon. Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing desert fields in a country they don't understand, against an enemy they can't see, for a cause they don't fully understand. Sergeant Sykes, a Marine lifer, heads up the scout/sniper platoon, while Troy, Swoff's friend and mentor, is a die-hard member of STA - the elite Marine Unit.