Single Striper: A Sideways Odyssey through the Peacetime Army

For military veterans of every era, especially those who served in the fifties and sixties, this comical, irreverent look back at the vanished peacetime Army will revive those zany memories of Basic Training and duty stations where humor was an enlisted man's only weapon against the boredom and aggravation inescapable in days crawling with tedium and mind-numbing details called chickenshit. Eager to escape boring college classrooms for a taste of real life, the author 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. He soon discovered that life in the Army's feudal atmosphere was a living comic strip in which he and his fellow enlistees were engaged in a secret underground campaign to steal moments of illicit pleasure when the Army's disgruntled minions were looking the other way. That's how it was back when the Army was almost fun, kind of like summer camp for slackers mixed with a relaxed prison system run by humorless primates called NCOs. So dive in and haul back to the wacky days of the peacetime Army, a time and place which, regrettably, will never be again.