Recommended Background Reading

A friend of mine recently recommended some background reading for me so I can make my story more realistic. To get the same input from you, I think it would be best for me to give you a rough rundown of my storyline.

• US military establishes a small guerilla force that fights independently in a war in the Brazilian rainforest (I need a reason why we'd be at war with Brazil)

• A soldier in this unit (a sniper) is exposed to some chemical that causes severe sensory deprivation that lasts for a day or longer and drives him crazy. The chemical is either a weapon either army is using, or some sort of pollen given off by an exotic yet-to-be-discovered plant

• The soldier returns home and slowly regains his sanity in a mental institution

• He is released home and returns fully to society shortly before the same chemical is intentionally/accidentally released in the US

• He works to rescuse survivors of the subsequent chaos and help his loved ones regain their own sanity. Due to his previous exposure, he is either immune to the chemical or can just find his way back to reality much more easily.

My friend recommended I read Inside the Aquarium for more support about the sensory deprivation aspect. The book is supposedly about a defector of the ultra-secret Soviet GRU who went through a sensory deprivation test. He gives a lot of detail about what it was like.

Unlike Kaavya Viswanathan, though, I will not be copy-pasting or even paraphrasing sections of reading material you suggest. I will include a references/recommended reading section at the end of the story and will only be using these materials to better polish my mental image of the story. People say you can only write what you know; while I might be a highly imaginative person, I have no idea what sensory deprivation or sniping, or the jungle, or insanity might really be like. I'd like to have third party input to make everything more believable.