It is the 1950s in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, as Bruce Johnson grows up in a traditional middle-class Caucasian family-a label that causes his mother to drink. When he starts school, he soon becomes the youngest student ever to be expelled from Saint Petronille Elementary School. Meanwhile, halfway around the globe, in Vietnam, Southeast Asia, the Geneva Accords effectively disunites the country at the seventeenth parallel. While on his unique coming-of-age journey, Bruce hunts for soda-pop bottles to return for two cents, ice skates on Lake Ellyn until dark, puts a male competitor in a headlock at an eighth-grade dance with the hopes of wooing his love interest, creates a radioactive science project that shuts down the entire competition, and much more. After graduating from high school by the proverbial skin of his teeth, Bruce receives a notice of eligibility for the draft, loses his appeal, and is recruited into the army where he soon finds himself charging headlong up a cursed hill into manhood. Set in chronological order, The Road to Hamburger Hill takes a light-hearted, nostalgic look at growing up during two transitional decades in America and serving in the Vietnam War.
