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Rating: 
Summary: A behind-the-lines WWII cog's terrors
Review: Nothing earth-shaking happens in the foreground of this brief (but intense) memoir of repressed longing and suppressed fear of a Wisconsin farmboy who was in the army but not in comabt during WWII. It may well make a mess of military chronology, but the feelings ring true. Peters wanted a kind of camraderie that was and remains forbidden in the American military. Typically of "the great generation," he desperately wanted to marry and to hide homoerotic desires. He received vicarious excitement from another clerk-typist bolder than he, who was acting on his homoerotic desires (and survived through his term of duty). The hard-scrabble existence of his Wisconsin childhood is also vividly and economically recalled.
Rating:
Summary: A behind-the-lines WWII cog's terrors
Review: Nothing earth-shaking happens in the foreground of this brief (but intense) memoir of repressed longing and suppressed fear of a Wisconsin farmboy who was in the army but not in comabt during WWII. It may well make a mess of military chronology, but the feelings ring true. Peters wanted a kind of camraderie that was and remains forbidden in the American military. Typically of "the great generation," he desperately wanted to marry and to hide homoerotic desires. He received vicarious excitement from another clerk-typist bolder than he, who was acting on his homoerotic desires (and survived through his term of duty). The hard-scrabble existence of his Wisconsin childhood is also vividly and economically recalled.
Rating: 
Summary: Useless as history.
Review: The new Amazon format forces the above number rating.This reviewer objects. Mr. Peters is able to recollect the "well sculptured butts" of other soldiers very effectively, but his other memories of World War II are faulty. He jumbles dates and events, mislabels units, quotes wildly inaccurate statistics and anachronistic conversations (paratrooper berets in 1943?) and claims "D-Day jitters" despite apparently having arrived in Europe some months too late for that historic event. The Brits have a useful term for this: "a dog's breakfast". Peters' erotic musing will find their audience, but military history readers will not take seriously a work which claims "O.D." stands for "off duty".
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