Within the first days of school in the opening chapter of Gary Schmidt's The Wednesday Wars, Mr. Guareschi, the school principal, announces over the school's public address system that Lieutenant Tybalt Baker, Mrs. Baker's husband, "will soon be deployed to Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division" ("September"). By the end of February, only five months after he was deployed, Mrs. Baker receives a telegram informing her that husband is missing in action and was last seen near the Khesanh marine base, a base surrounded by 20,000 Viet Cong soldiers bombing the marines with "five hundred mortar shells a day" ("March").

By the end of May, Mrs. Baker receives a second telegram, this time from her husband himself. The telegram reports that he has been rescued and will be "HOME IN TIME FOR STRAWBERRIES." Later, the newspapers report Lieutenant Baker had been shot down in a helicopter, and before the helicopter hit the ground, he jumped. Though he broke his leg when it got "caught by one of the broken blades" of the helicopter, he was otherwise unharmed. With his broken leg, he had "hid in the jungle" near the Khesnah base, taken care of his wound as best he could, and survived on chocolate bars. He was then taken in by a Vietnamese woman who lost her two sons to the war. He remained hidden and cared for in her home for three months until he was able to signal to a US helicopter flying overhead.