Publisher's Synopsis
This comical jaunt through the peacetime army resurrects the flavor of that moment between the Korean War and Vietnam when, with no enemy against which to hurl itself, the Army sank into a lethargic stupor.Thus was born the Army of crawling boredom and endless waiting; of mind-numbing details known to GIs everywhere as chickenshit; of time dripping slowly into a vacuum.Eager to escape boring college classrooms for a taste of real life, I saw the Army as an adventurous rite of passage as well as a passport to exotic places and, fueled by this delusion, volunteered for the draft. I soon discovered that life in the Army's feudal atmosphere was a living, breathing comic strip in which we enlisted men and draftees were engaged in an underground campaign to maintain our sanity and steal moments of illicit pleasure when the Army's minions were looking the other way.That's how it was back when the Army was almost fun, kind of like a relaxed prison system run by humorless primates called NCOs. So grab hold of my shirttail and haul back with me to the wacky days of the peacetime Army, a time and place which, regrettably, will never be again.
