The Army that appears in the following pages is the Army seldom written about--that of sleep-walking boredom; of repetitive, mind-numbing and absurd details; of scowling, anal-retentive NCOs watching their disgruntled charges for signs of unauthorized pleasure; of days itching with tedium marching one after another in deadly sameness into the dim future.

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 volunteered for the draft. He quickly discovered that the army, with its martial airs, enforced class divisions, and its rigid and humorless nature, was a living comic strip, populated by a pseudo-serious parade of starched, aloof officers and crude humanoids called NCOs.

One looked for chinks in this armored process, a moment when our warders were looking the other way. After all, we draftees and volunteers were still full of the antic energy of our post-adolescence, and quickly realized that the only thing that would save the experience from wearing one down to a disgruntled nub was to “bug out” whenever we could and salvage some fun from it. To get through our tours with our civilian identities intact then became our secret undeclared war.

That’s how it was back when the Army was almost fun, kind of like summer camp run by humorless Mother Superiors. 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.