Repeatedly, warfare presses far too Rmany human beings into starkly inhumane actions. Much pulp fiction and macho video has been generated to replay the Viet Nam war so that once-betrayed warriors can win some compensatory slice of honor by defeating evil communists or freeing forgotten prisoners of war. Similarly, other popular treatments of the Viet Nam war era pose antiwar activists as obvious heroes struggling to end what they view as an obviously evil conflict. Robert Olen Butler's fiction which deals with the Viet Nam war era carries the reader into the social, political, military, ethical and moral chaos of the times, reflecting the divergent views of Americans and Vietnamese, but without making simplistic propaganda tools of his stories or characters.

In time of war, when soldiers are expected to destroy the enemy, humane behavior becomes a rare phenomenon.

With On Distant Ground, Butler poses one...