By the early 1970s, President John F. Kennedy has survived several assassination attempts and—martyred, heroic—is now in his third term. Twenty-two-year-old Eugene Allen returns home from his tour of duty in Vietnam and begins to write a war novel—a book echoing Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five—about veterans who have their battlefield experiences "enfolded," wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy. In Eugene's fictive universe, veterans too damaged to be enfolded stalk the American heartland, reenacting atrocities on civilians and evading the Psych Corps, a federal agency dedicated to upholding the mental hygiene of the nation by any means necessary.