Fear and Desire opens with an off-screen narration by actor David Allen who tells the audience:

There is a war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war. And the enemies who struggle here do not exist unless we call them into being. This forest then, and all that happens now is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time, but have no other country but the mind.[4]
The story is set during a war between two unidentified countries. An airplane carrying four soldiers from one country has crashed six miles behind enemy lines. The soldiers come upon a river and build a raft, hoping they can use the waterway to reach their battalion. As they are building their raft, they are approached by a young peasant girl who does not speak their language. The soldiers apprehend the girl and bind her to a tree with their belts. The youngest of them is left behind to guard the girl. He starts to talk to her, but as she doesn't understand him he talks always more as a delirium and when he unbelts her believing she will embrace him, she tries to escape and the young soldier shoots her dead. Mac, another soldier of the four persuades the commander to let him take the raft for a solo voyage in connection with a plan to kill an enemy general at a nearby base. The remaining two soldiers successfully infiltrate the base. They talk and eat with their own general and return to the river to await Mac. Sitting there they philosophize about war and how no man is made for it.[5]
What does the girl try to do when she is unbelted?
She tries to escape