As a child during the Second World War, Gary Paulsen and his mother travelled from Chicago to the Philippines, summoned by his father, a distant, imperious army officer whom Gary had never known. With his mother, who was sometimes fiercely protective, sometimes selfishly neglectful, Gary witnessed scenes of extreme horror (such as a bloody encounter with sharks in the Pacific), and these memories alternate with tender evocations of his life of a young boy growing up at an extraordinary time.