Sometime in the 1970s, as more Americans began to rally against the Vietnam War, an unknown cynic parodied the U.S. Army's promotional recruitment tagline with the slogan, "Join the Army! Travel to unusual places. Meet interesting people, and kill them."
The killing part, at least, pretty much describes how John Rain, author Barry Eisler's fictional half-Japanese, half-American assassin for hire, spent his time in Vietnam, on joint military-CIA missions run by a clandestine outfit called the Studies and Observation Group (SOG).
"When I got the idea for the character (in 1993, when I was first living in Tokyo), I spent a lot of time thinking about where an assassin like Rain might come from, what would be his worldview, what would be his formative experiences," Eisler recently told The Japan Times in an interview. "But what was missing, was a more comprehensive explanation, a clearer depiction of the crucible that forged Rain's character and outlook. I found myself wondering whether there was one set of events that, more than any other, shaped Rain's destiny. And I realized there was: what happened to him in love and war, and what he did during that long ago summer of 1972."