The novel’s original version was set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, which was changed to the Iraq War for modern audiences. In the Q&A at the end of the book, Duncan states,

[…] No matter where we are in history, we’re probably going to have a war, and all you have to do is change the name of the war and you’ve got the same story. I see very few differences between then and now—these are unpopular wars that many people feel we should not be or should not have been involved in [...]. Here it transferred automatically into another war, and that’s a pretty horrible thing to think about (206).

This is not the first work in which America’s many wars have been transposed to benefit audience sensibilities. M*A*S*H—the movie and the television show— featured the Korean War as its setting. This allowed it to express anti-war sentiments in popular fiction against the contentious Vietnam War, only one year before the first publication of I Know What You Did Last Summer.

The ongoing nature of America’s involvement in wars is highlighted in both editions of I Know What You Did Last Summer.