The book starts out picturing a young man who foolishly wants to go to war where he in vision's himself receiving all these high class medals for heroism but never once taking into account what it is going to take physically and mentally to get those medals. He's constantly playing a head game within himself and those that surround him. He like so many other young men of past eras are trying to be something that they're not and that small initial lie grows into a tremendous reputation that he has to live with and soon regrets that he's known by such. Come walk with the author and his brothers of the sword through the dark, humid, unforgiving jungles of Vietnam and experience the death, destruction, and mental sacrificial anguish they had to endure. Come see why you fear being alone in the denseness of a jungle or a forest that you have never entered before. Feel the heat of the Asian jungle floor intermixed with the leaches, ants, mosquitoes, snakes and humans searching you out only to destroy you at any cost. You see our author starts out innocently enough but soon finds out that war is not only a physical hardship demanding its pounds of flesh, but also is a horrendous mental agonizing hazard from which there is only one means of escape and/or retreat. That means to an end is death. Yes the author and his brothers of the sword will take their heroic missions and sacrificial allegiances to the grave with them. But, the real tragedy of it all is no one really cares about them in the first place. For they were and still are the "Secret Soldiers of the Second Army" willing to go anywhere, any time, to do the impossible for the ungrateful.

Now It Can Be Told comprises of Philip Gibbs recollections regarding the First World War, in which he served as an officially commissioned war reporter. Titled in reference to the relieving of censorship laws following the conclusion of World War One in 1918, this book is noticeably different from the censored or dumbed-down accounts published under Gibbs' byline in popular newspapers as the conflict wore on. In this book, the full scale of the horror wrought in Europe is told unflinchingly with the aim of showing the depravity of conflict and the destruction that results. Early in the war, Gibbs' frank and accurate accounts of the carnage of modern warfare unnerved the British government, who were concerned his accounts would demoralize citizens and turn them against the war effort. Gibbs was ordered home; on refusing to cease reporting, he was arrested and forcibly brought back to Britain.