In August, 1964, a young U.S. Navy radio operator found himself in waters he had never heard of, participating in the expansion of a war in a nation he didn't know existed: Vietnam. What he learned from actions he witnessed and the classified messages he handled over the next 10 months left him shaken, disillusioned, and full of questions about America's responses to events in the Tonkin Gulf and South China Sea, including the rush to bomb North Vietnam and the Johnson Administration's decisions to vastly expand the presence of U.S. ground, air, and naval forces in Southeast Asia. Some within the U.S. 7th Fleet knew almost from the outset that the still-controversial "second attack" which triggered the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution did not involve North Vietnamese PT boats firing on U.S. Navy destroyers in pitch-dark seas. What it did involve, others have since shown, was something simpler and much stranger. This is one sailor's memories of being present at the ragged beginnings of a long conflict that ultimately failed and cost 58,000 American lives.

Erwin Tennyson is an unemployed newspaper writer who made his living reviewing detective novels until he lost his job in the Great Recession. When he stumbles over a woman's dead body in a park, he reports his find to the budget-challenged Austin, Texas police, and is convinced the woman was murdered. He is appalled when he learns the police have listed her death as a "Jane Doe suicide." When Erwin can't find another paid book reviewer's position, he decides to become a private investigator to try to earn a living-and track down the woman's killer. But Erwin is no tough guy. He has zero fighting skills, and he hasn't fired a gun in 40 years. Working as a P.I. without a state license is a felony in Texas; only ex-cops or university graduates with criminal justice degrees qualify for the permit. Undaunted, Erwin takes the law into his own hands and risks arrest as he investigates, unaware that he also is setting himself up to be the killer's next victim.