For You, Lili Marlene: A Memoir of World War II

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.