Saigon, Illinois

This is a piece of Americana that is under-explored: the life of a Conscientious objector. In 1968, Jim Holder, trying to avoid the draft by doing "alternative service" as a CO, is sent to work in a Chicago hospital. He has to work for two years and then he's free, but if he is found unsatisfactory and is fired, off to boot camp or prison he goes. He escapes (temporarily?) the clutches of the U.S. government, just to find himself at the mercy of sticky hospital politics. The writing is infused with irony and black humor. "I thought that by not going to Vietnam, I would have no contact with death, but everyday I carried bodies to the morgue." Holder is no revolutionary, although we do meet some in the book, and you could say he is not a true CO, because he makes his girlfriend get an abortion, and he is not religious. Yet, he seems like the only sane person in a crazy world.