Customer Reviews

In The Army Now

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David Willson (the REMF) strikes again with biting honesty about war and love. Or is it love and war? No matter, he handles both subjects superbly and with wry humor. This book presents two sides of the initial enlistment of a soldier during the Vietnam War-that of a wife and that of the soldier himself. Will he make it through basic without dying? Will his wife run off with the handsome stranger at the coat check room? Will he ever learn steno? These are just some of the life and death questions dealt with in this very funny and honest look at gender relations and war.

In the Army Now, is a coming of age story focused on the innocence of a young man, drafted into the Army during the height of the Vietnam conflict in the mid-sixties. The story seesaws in a rhythm of anxiety, self-doubt, hope, and anger centered between two newly weds torn away from each other because of the U.S. Army. Mr.Willson has a nack for making this interesting by setting the characters in the illusion that the self is a separate ego, housed in a bag of skin, that can somehow overcome the real world of mental, financial, and physical obstacles. With Willson's customary lucidity and wit, he somehow shows that youths dreams are never far from insanity. It is a good, well-versed manual of things that can go wrong, which any father might slip to his son, or mother to her daughter, upon the threshold of adult life. Franklin D. Rast, author, Don's Nam, Ghosts In The Wire