When mysterious spacecraft touch down around the world, a team, including linguist Louise Banks, is brought together to investigate. As humankind teeters on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time for answers, and to find them, she will take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity.

In "Platoon," a middle-class college student volunteers for the war in Vietnam because he considers it his patriotic duty. The first thing he encounters on the airport tarmac in Saigon is a cart of body bags. It's downhill from there: endless hikes, ditch-digging, heat, rain, bugs and snakebites, fear and confusion, sleeplessness, and terror when he finally sleeps. He will only gradually, unknowingly, become an adequate soldier--one who has left innocence...