Love Suffers When Duty Calls When Army Specialist Mike Ward arrives in Vietnam, he has to face the fact that his life is falling apart. Forced to leave law school less than a year earlier, he finds himself stationed at a forward artillery firebase just as US troop withdrawals are snowballing. Seasoned soldiers are being sent home early, and newcomers like him are having to make do. Back home, the lines of communication with his girlfriend have gone cold since she walked out on what was supposed to have been a romantic farewell dinner, smashing a bottle of red wine in the process. While his life is on the line, she is mired in an environment where the only publicly acceptable form of dialogue about Vietnam is a war protest. As Mike struggles to cope with the precarious security at his outpost, his only means of salvaging what's left of his hopes and dreams are old-fashioned, handwritten letters. Firebase is a story of wartime suspense and long-distance romance set in an era when respect for the American military was at an all-time low. It tells of a wartime romance Vietnam itself could not crack but which the social and political fallout therefrom could savage.