Shrapnel Wounds is the combat memoir of Lieutenant Tom Crowley, an enthusiastic and highly trained U.S. Army enlistee and Officer Candidate School grad who enters combat in Vietnam in mid-1966.

Highly regarded by his infantry platoon and strongly encouraged by his superiors to become a professional soldier, Crowley almost inadvertently examines the system by which career officers are shepherded through to higher and higher rank—and increasingly rejects that system over the course of his one-year combat tour.