The World Played Chess

Vincent and Elizabeth are devoted supporters of their son Beau’s high school football team. Beau’s best friend, Chris, is also on the team and is being recruited by Stanford University. Chris’s father hopes that Chris will get in on a football scholarship since the family can’t afford the tuition at Stanford, but he also worries that playing so hard will injure Chris. During an important football game. Beau is hit hard in the head, and the doctor on the scene worries that he has a concussion. Beau insists he can play, but Vincent doesn’t allow him to. Beau is disappointed, but Vincent knows that it’s better to be safe than to leave Beau’s health and life to chance.

Kenny dies from the wounds inflicted in his shootout with North Vietnamese soldiers. William is shocked by Cruz’s ability to move on so quickly from Kenny’s death. This is the first time William has ever seen someone die.

On the job site, Vincent asks again about William’s work as a photojournalist. William explains that he was ordered to leave Vietnam quite suddenly and that he left without his belongings, including his camera and film. He never got that film back because the government considered it to be its property and didn’t want him to privately publish disturbing and controversial images of the war. William also tells Vincent that when he came back from the war, potential employers who learned that he was a veteran worried about his mental health. He couldn’t bear to return to his prewar life in New Jersey with his family, so he followed a girl to California. Even though the relationship didn’t work out, he ended up staying in California.

After his day working, Vincent packs up his athletic and academic trophies and puts them away. He’s slightly ashamed of how important they have been to him after hearing William’s stories about the war and the medals he earned—medals that William doesn’t care about.

The next dead bodies William sees are corpses of the Viet Cong, lined up on the ground by American troops keeping count. Many of the soldiers use racial slurs and other dehumanizing terms when referring to the North Vietnamese Army or the Viet Cong. A soldier tries to take credit for these dead men, but William defends Kenny’s memory by pointing out noting that Kenny died killing the men. Cruz introduces William to cigarettes because the nicotine takes the edge off stress, and William soon develops an addiction to them. Cruz explains to William that there is no point in trying to seize territory at this point in the war; their unspoken mission is to kill as many North Vietnamese soldiers as they can.

Mike, Vincent’s sister’s boyfriend, leaves the construction site for another job, and William and Vincent therefore work more closely together. Two young women in a house neighboring the construction site flirt with Vincent, but he doesn’t know how to flirt back. Vincent went to an all-boys school and has had very little experience with girls. Todd and William take Vincent out to a bar. William tells him that he was so scared in Vietnam that nothing in his life before or after the war could compare. He stopped getting scared only when he stopped caring if he lived or died.

Cruz takes William out of base to buy marijuana. William has wanted to be sober throughout the war, but he loses his resolve the night Kenny dies. The woman from whom Cruz buys marijuana also employs sex workers, and William has sex for the first time with one of them. William feels bad for the women, but he appreciates that Cruz chose him to accompany him on this outing.

Vincent joins William’s softball team. After a winning game, the team goes out for pizza and beer. The two young women Vincent met on the job arrive, one with a boyfriend. They are cousins. Amy, the one without the boyfriend, is visiting from New York, and after she hangs out with Vincent at the bar, she invites Vincent back to her cousin’s house. There, Amy introduces Vincent to weed and to sex—both first-time experiences for Vincent. Vincent finds himself becoming more attached to Amy than he should be, given their age difference and the fact that she lives in New York City. Years later, they run into one another at a comedy club in New York.

This diary entry has one sentence: “Dying is hardest on the living” (153).

Beau’s friend Chris gets injured in a football game and his university scholarship offers are revoked. Football season turns into basketball season, which means that Vincent and Elizabeth switch their attention to Mary Beth’s sport. Beau refuses to go to any of her games, even though she attends all of his football games. Tensions escalate when Beau refuses to go to his sister’s specially planned 16th birthday party. He and Vincent argue, and Mary Beth cries.

William finally writes a letter home. He’s cautious about his reports of the war. Per Cruz’s advice, William hasn’t made any friends in Vietnam, as most of the other young men surrounding him are rotated out or killed.

Vincent and his friends struggle to come up with something to do. Although Vincent has been growing tired of his friends’ shenanigans, such as dining and dashing, he goes with them to a hole-in-the-wall bar, where Vincent uses his older brother’s expired ID to buy drinks. A man in the bar plays piano for tips. To ingratiate themselves with the bartender, Vincent and his friends give the piano player tips and request songs. Soon, other patrons do the same, and the bar gets so lively that people start coming in off the street. The bartender thanks Vincent. The piano player is the bartender’s brother; a decade earlier, he had been on the cusp of signing with a record label but got drafted to Vietnam, where his future was destroyed by trauma.

Vincent’s friend Lenny Mifton (nicknamed Mif) is the driver for the night. Vincent is his last stop, but they run out of gas. Vincent helps Mif push the car up a hill close to his house, then gets in the car before Mif has the chance to. The car goes downhill quickly, leaving Mif behind. Vincent shouts out to him that he’ll come back to pick him up with his car. But when Vincent coasts Mif’s car into his driveway and gets into his own car, he can’t find Mif. He drives all over town for an hour, with no sign of Mif. The next morning, Vincent’s mother gets a phone call from Mif’s mother, who says Mif never came home the night before. Vincent gets worried, but Mif calls to let him know he had walked to Ed’s house and spent the night there. Later, when Vincent tells William this story, he realizes that watching others die was the norm for William in Vietnam, whereas for Vincent, the death of a friend would have been the result of a stupid decision.

William’s troop is ordered to prepare for an ambush of North Vietnamese soldiers, who will certainly fight back.

On the job site, Vincent nearly electrocutes himself because he isn’t paying attention to his surroundings. William saves him, but Vincent can see that the incident has brought back memories of seeing so many men die in Vietnam. Vincent notices that William comes into work more ragged, skinnier, and hungover than usual. Vincent figures that William must drink a lot to quiet his traumatic memories.

As William packs for battle, he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. At first, he thinks he is seeing a stranger, and it takes him a moment to see himself. War has aged the 19-year-old William beyond his own recognition.

Vincent is embarrassed about his near accident on the job site. He meets his friends Mif, Billy, Ed, Mickey, and Scotty at a bar. Mickey is supposed to be the driver, but he gets too drunk, so the others drive him home, leaving him at the door, ringing the doorbell, and then piling back into the car. From there, they see Mickey’s father punch him in the face and leave him outside. Shocked and upset, Vincent helps Mickey up, rings the doorbell again, and faces Mickey’s father. After that night, Vincent stops hanging out with Mickey, Ed, and Scotty. From their mutual friends, he eventually learns of Scotty’s death and how Mickey and Ed both took over their fathers’ businesses.

William prepares for a search-and-destroy mission with his squadron.

At one of their baseball matches, Vincent’s team gets in a brawl with the opposing team. A large player goes after Vincent, but William stands in between them. William has a glazed look in his eyes, so Vincent uses William’s Vietnam War nickname, Shutter, to bring him back to reality.

William has been told over and over again by his military superiors not to get attached to people in the war because it is likely they will die. Even though he tries to keep a distance between himself and others, he can’t help but be affected by every death he witnesses. Even though deaths are frequent and there is little time to process or mourn each one, William can’t stop thinking about his dead comrades or the fact that he could be dead along with any one of them. This possibility comes home to him when a young man named EZ, who is walking just in front of William, gets blown up. EZ’s death could have easily been William’s but for one second that made all the difference. William holds EZ as he dies and wonders whether EZ’s mother can sense the moment of her son’s death.

Ultimately, Beau decides to attend his sister’s birthday celebration. They have a great night as a family, but when they return home, Vincent receives a phone call from the high school principal, Mr. Rochambeau, who is calling to check in on Beau because Chris and some of his friends were in a major car accident that night. A drunk driver had swerved into their lane, and the driver of Chris’s car swerved off the road and flipped the car. Chris died in this car accident. Vincent delivers the tragic news to Beau.

Vincent helps his son through his grief. The loss of Chris is a community-wide tragedy, so everyone comes together. Vincent needs a break from reading William’s journal because he is dealing with death in his own life. He doesn’t want his son to end up jaded and traumatized by death the way that William was.

On his long excursions through the jungle of Vietnam, William becomes more and more embittered by the war. He has accepted that the reason he’s in Vietnam is to kill, and the more that he watches his comrades die, the more darkness he feels in himself.

William and Vincent grow increasingly close as the summer goes on. William confides more in Vincent, who “was the blank pages of a journal William could fill with the stories cluttering his mind, the ones that became the nightmares that haunted his sleep and led him to the bottle and the drugs” (235). William regrets his past. He had been a promising student athlete but had been injured and couldn’t go to college on a wrestling scholarship. He let that setback get in the way of his education, and after the war he never got back on track.

Vincent notices that William’s hand shakes a lot and that he seems more morose in general. One day, as William and Vincent drive together to a job site, William becomes incensed when a woman cuts him off in traffic and makes a rude gesture. He follows her until he is able to corner her car with his in a parking garage, bringing the woman to tears. When they leave, William tells Vincent that he had followed the woman to teach her a valuable lesson about not instigating fights because he might have been a dangerous man who wanted to hurt her.

William and his squadron come across three North Vietnamese soldiers, but they are just the first of many with whom they engage in a fierce fire battle. William helps save many of his comrades by using grenades to take down a machine gun. After the battle is over, he is in shock. He helps medics collect the many injured among the many dead.

On his way out of a liquor store with his friends, Vincent holds the door open for a guy around his age and the guy’s girlfriend. When Vincent gets on the road, the guy tails him, nearly causing an accident. Vincent gets out of the car to confront him. The guy accuses Vincent or one of his friends of saying something inappropriate to his girlfriend. Vincent gears up for a fight, but then remembers all the lessons he’s learned from William so far. He apologizes to the girlfriend, and the cars separate. His friends are surprised he didn’t go in for the fight, but for once, Vincent is honest with them. He puts aside his male bravado and admits that he simply didn’t want to fight.

William finally comes to terms with the reality of the American situation in Vietnam. He meets villagers who stare at him with suspicion. Americans are not the heroes in Vietnam; they are the foreign antagonists. In these villages, the American soldiers ask for Viet Cong. In one village, an AK-47 is found, incriminating the entire village as friendly to the Viet Cong. William and his squadron clear out the village and burn it to the ground.

Vincent tells William about the incident with the guy from the liquor store. William suspects that one of Vincent’s friends really did say something to the girlfriend and suggests that Vincent get new friends. But William does agree that Vincent shouldn’t get in a fight he doesn’t care about because he is sure to lose and hurt others in the process. William compares that fight to his time in Vietnam, where he and the other soldiers didn’t care about the reasons for their involvement in the war. Not truly having your heart in a fight means you won’t fight hard enough to win. Still, Vincent worries about not being perceived as tough as Todd. William is surprised that Vincent thinks Todd acts tough. What Vincent sees as a tough-guy saunter is actually a limp. In the Vietnam War, Todd was so desperate to get out that he drunkenly convinced another drunk soldier to break his leg. Todd would never walk the same again, but he did get out on medical leave just before the rest of his platoon got into a massive battle that killed most of them.

Throughout his time in Vietnam, William increasingly loses his faith in God. He turns angry at God, who allows such destruction and death to occur. Soon, William gives up on God entirely.

Vincent becomes more responsible as the summer goes on. He parties less with his friends, sleeps more, and commits himself to his work with Todd’s construction company. However, William gets worse as the summer goes on. Todd reveals that William’s girlfriend broke up with him and that William is now essentially unhoused, living out of his car.

Vincent asks William why he no longer wears the crucifix chain his mother had given him before the war. William tells Vincent a horrifying story. During the war, men took turns being point, which meant that they would be the first of the squadron to walk while on a march, looking out for grenades and other weapons. William switched his shift with a guy named Forecheck, whose birthday was during his shift and who thought it would be bad luck to do the shift just then. But a major trap was set up for the men, and Forecheck died a horrible death, his body parts spread all over the trees around them. Because Forecheck’s family was Catholic and needed a body to give him a burial, William peeled a piece of Forecheck’s body off the trees and placed his crucifix with it. After that, William disavowed religion and faith.