This book begins with a young soldier who has just finished basic and advanced training about to ship out to his next step en route to Vietnam. He meets a young nurse on the plane and considers making a move, but doesn’t, but he does meet another young soldier and they form a friendship. The death of this fellow soon thereafter haunts him for the rest of the novel. For a book for young readers, this is a pretty intense book. There’s basically no honest way to talk about the Vietnam War without that being true. There’s some really bad apologia about Vietnam that has been around since the war. So for example, The Green Berets is not only naked propaganda, it includes a scene of John Wayne scolding a reporter for being cynical and then having that reporter apologize later. Blegh.
So the book covers death and violence, racism, classism, and to some very small extent drug use in the war. The book discusses not only racism toward Black, Latino, and Native American soldiers, but also how the use of anti-Asian slurs against the NVA and Viet Cong, is demeaning to the soldiers and too close to anti-Black slurs for comfort. It also liberally splashes f*****s throughout the text, which is a reasonable portrayal of the times.
It still holds up as powerful and intense and explains a lot about the war to future generations, without pro-US propaganda (but does allow for pro-war opinions to be part of the portrayal).