The main character is Arlen Washington who grew up in a broken family on the worst streets of Baltimore. He is persuaded by a more fortunate friend to complete high school and enlist in the Air Force to avoid being drafted into the Army as the Vietnam War is raging. But getting into the Air Force did not keep them out of the Vietnam war. Arlen's friend gets an administrative job, but Arlen is assigned as a gunner on an Air Force AC-47 gunship.
The AC-47 was a novel type of warplane in that era. Traditional, warplanes were designed with guns mounted in the nose or wings to fire forward and the pilot aimed the guns by aiming the plane at the target. However, the AC-47's guns were mounted to fire out the side of the aircraft aligned with axis of the wings. To attack a target on the ground, the pilot would bank the aircraft into a turn and whatever the wing tip pointed at, the guns would hit. The AC-47 was simply an armed version of the military's C-47 which was a military version of the Douglas DC-3 passenger and cargo plane that that had carried cargo and paratroopers all over the world in World War II. It could linger over a battlefield for hours and deliver devastatingly accurate close support fire for embattled troops on the ground.
Arlen is an angry, alienated 19-year old and does not get along well with the rest of the crew. The gunship crew includes two gunners, Arlen and airman Timmy Otis. Timmy is the opposite of Arlen, cooperative, positive, eager. One night at the height of the monsoon season, their gunship is hit by enemy fire and crash lands on a muddy road in a narrow valley unoccupied by either friend or foe. Bad weather grounds rescue helicopters. The nearest Army unit that could attempt a rescue is a motley Army engineer unit operating in the next valley on a road-clearing mission.
The gunship crew manages to salvage the gunship's weapons, three powerful six-barrel miniguns, each capable of firing up to 6,000 rounds a minute. The rescue effort is successful, but at considerable cost to the engineer unit, which lose two armored combat vehicles representing most of their defensive firepower. Events strand Arlen and Timmy Otis with their rescuers who return to their mission opening a road to an isolated base near the border with Cambodia. The enemy used areas in Cambodia as both a sanctuaries from allied attacks and as staging areas for offensives into Vietnam. The road was to be cleared to enable a battery of heavy, long-range artillery to be moved to the base in anticipation of an expected major enemy offensive.
Arlen had been harboring an angry, juvenile fantasy of somehow gaining possession of (stealing) one of the miniguns and smuggling it home to become the biggest badass in his neighborhood. This fantasy prompted him to argue for salvaging the guns during their rescue, especially one particular gun. The guns on an AC-47 were mounted in a fixed position and could not be individually aimed. However, one had been damaged and replaced with a different model, one that, depending on how it was mounted, could be individually aimed.
Fantasy motivated Arlen to salvage the guns, fear motivated him to suggest and help devise a means to mount the flexible model on one of the engineer's dump trucks.
Subsequently, both on the road and at their destination, they face desperate battles in the unfloding enemy offensive. Through these experiences, Arlen's shell of angry alienation cracks open, he learns true brotherhood and discovers an inner courage that, with Arlen's gun, proves vital to his and his rescuers' survival. The battles illustrate much the nature of combat in Vietnam based on actual events and individual actions, and of the character and compassion of American soldiers in that era.
