Something about a Soldier

I found this immensely enjoyable. It is not loaded with rip-roaring adventure, but just recollections of time spent in a bygone era from an older man looking back on his young self. Lots of good humor and thoughtful observations. Willeford writes with his feet on the ground and just tells it like it is (was). Anyone interested in this place and time (1936) and what life may have been like for a young man in the military back then just prior to WWII should enjoy this. A good solid autobiography.

Charles Willeford is most famous as an author of "pulp" fiction, but he had also spent 20 years in the US Army and Air Force starting in the 1930s. This memoir is a gem for those interested in studying the interwar US Army. Willeford gives a warts and all (and frequently raunchy) picture of the live of an enlisted man during that period. This is one of only two books that I know written by an enlisted man of the interwar Army and it is unfortunate that more enlisted soldiers did not write about their experiences. This book is essential to any historian of the interwar US Army.

I borrowed the title of this review from another reviewer, who hit the nail on the head. All I can add is that the "stuff" Willeford writes about is working class life, and at nearly the bottom of the barrel at that. This particular stuff needs, and needed, to be written about. Back in the 1930s, the time period of this book, people knew there were social classes, and some artists (e.g., Steinbeck, James T. Farrell) tried to show the life of the lower ones. In doing so they provided a nice balance in how Americans saw the country. Today most mass media will not touch working class life. All they show us is upper middle and above. They foster the notion that everyone here is doing just fine, Jack. In fact, more and more people are dropping off the bottom of the middle class into poverty these days. Willeford's two autobiographies tell us a lot about what it's like to be down there once your drop is over. And he does this in a style that succeeds in Earnest Hemingway's program of stripping down the language better than Hemingway did. in Hemingway's work there is always a sense of the craftsman behind the character, self-consciously paring away language according to his stylistic ideology. Willeford just tells his story in language anyone can follow, period. Little is said about the biographee's emotions in the process, so you are free to provide your own. "How would I feel in that situation?" you find yourself asking again and again. This fosters reader involvement, and also does something else. If smart young Willeford had to do stuff that gross and/or boring to survive, and I am able to understand "there but for fortune go I", then gradually I get a truly visceral idea of just how desperate the times being written of really were. We need this idea. It might help us want to do something to stop the current slide into recession or worse.

This a great book for anyone who wants to know what life in the pre-WW II US Army was like. This would be a shorter and more realistic companion piece to James Jones "From Here to Eternity". The stories of the Disappointed Bride and Life in the Fading Days of the Cavalry are priceless.

Funny, interesting, informative. The stuff nobody else writes about. The best of the best.