I enjoyed the hell out of Charles Willeford's SOMETHING ABOUT A SOLDIER. (Not to be confused with Mark Harris's novel of the same name, which I also admired.) There was much in this raunchy military memoir that I could relate to, though Willeford's adventures in the army took place nearly thirty years before mine. He writes about the tedium and boredom of much of his first hitch in the Air Corps as a fuel truck driver in the Philippines, but also provides graphic details about his frequent drunks and sexual escapades with local prostitutes in his off-duty time. He also describes local natives, drinks and food - delicacies like 'baluts,' which were odiferous fertilized duck eggs, something I remember reading about in James Crumley's Vietnam era novel, ONE TO COUNT CADENCE. He hung out with a couple Signal Corps men who, he said, could copy fifty words a minute in Morse code - a job I held myself nearly thirty years later during my own time with the Army Security Agency and wrote about in SOLDIER BOY. His description of the whores he encountered in Hawaii brought to mind the characters from James Jones' classic WWII novel, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. His training with the Cavalry during his second hitch reminded me of another fine book, Victor Vogel's SOLDIERS OF THE OLD ARMY.

Willeford fancied himself a poet, though he dropped out of junior high before enlisting in the army at sixteen, in the depths of the Great Depression, to escape a life of grinding poverty in Los Angeles. But he was a voracious reader, devouring the work of Thomas Wolfe, Steinbeck and Jack London, as well as some of the hack writers of his day - Tiffany Thayer, Donald Henderson Clark, etc. - writers popular with his army buddies.

Willeford ended up serving twenty years in the army, and emerged from WWII as a much-decorated veteran. He did go to college much later in life and taught at the University of Miami. He authored nearly twenty books, including many popular detective novels. He died in 1988, just two years after the publication of this book.

I really enjoyed Willeford's story and was sorry to get to the end of it. Wished I could call him up and chat. No dice with that. R.I.P., Will. And thanks for sharing these great stories from your youth. Highly recommended, especially for military veterans. ( )

Willeford doesn't candy coat anything in this memoir. He gives us a very engaging, non-airbrushed account of being a young man in the military during the great depression. However, it's not all just whoring and drinking and gambling but an honest and even endearing tale of how young Willeford grows into a young adult-hood and finally manages get ahead in the army . Similar to E. C. Abbott's fantastic We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher, which is also a "tell it like it was" kind of a book. ( )