1968.

Henry’s just turned 18, and his birthday present is a second class ticket to the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War you’ve never heard about.

The Hero Versus Me & Monkey Jo chronicles the adventures of Henry Neis who arrives in Vietnam an innocent youth from Kansas, and quickly falls in with addicts and lost souls. Perry Shepard’s prose pulls the listener into the “scene” immediately, and propels us on a journey that is at times exhilarating, shocking, and moving. A rollicking listen and an eye-opening look at the experience of soldiers in Vietnam, Henry’s story describes his rescue of a baby monkey, while on a dangerous mission, who becomes his faithful companion. Henry volunteers to leave the relative safety of his camp, and travel from DaNang to the DMZ on a mission to get active-duty soldiers to put their signatures on insurance paperwork required by the US military.

Many of the soldiers had left their "Notification of Next of Kin" forms blank; some put Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh down as their beneficiaries. Military command wanted the name of their next of kin, given their likelihood of dying in battle. Henry and Monkey Jo travel, gathering stories and dispensing drugs. They interact with hooch maids, waitresses, drug dealers, remnants of the French colonizers, the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese Regular Army. Along the way, Henry records the stories of fellow GI’s and works to supply what he feels fellow soldiers need to survive in the surreal environment during the Vietnam War - including the next fix. Henry’s travels allow him, and the listener, to see how some soldiers cope with self-doubt, fear, loneliness, distrust of the army and the government, and questions of morality

Henry takes us to a place of clashing cultures as we trudge with him and Monkey Jo through the jungle into enemy territory, surviving the devastated landscape created by Agent Orange, and visiting the makeshift compounds put up for the American soldiers to camp in.