In this vivid and deeply moving memoir, novelist Robert Kotlowitz recounts his experiences as a teen-age infantryman in the Second World War. In a voice both restrained and unsentimental, he releases the memories that he has fiercely held on to for fifty years, memories of his comrades in arms, his youthful idealism, and - at the dark center of the tale - the massacre of his platoon in the hills of northeastern France.

With his sharp, ironic novelist's eye, Kotlowitz brings every moment of his experience to life, from the day he's drafted as an eighteen-year-old and thrown into basic training and maneuvers in Tennessee (where, in a grimly foreboding incident, twenty fellow recruits drown in the flooded waters of the Cumberland River). We feel the excitement of a young Francophile in the idyllic French countryside, and the anxiety of a Jew about to face the German army.

We sense the author's youthful idealism begin to slip away as he faces foolish superiors, senseless orders, useless drudgery.

Then, suddenly, Kotlowitz faces death itself: his platoon is sent to the front and finds itself in a tense waiting game with German soldiers dug in only a couple of hundred yards away. Time passes anxiously, punctuated only by artillery fire and the hissing of potshots from German rifles. Eventually, inexplicably, the platoon is ordered to attack - and they are slaughtered.

Kotlowitz alone comes through unscathed, but only by playing dead for twelve hours while machine-gun fire, mortar shells, and grenades explode around him and his friends lie dying. He survives, filled with guilt and self-recrimination, as well as rage at the American officers who ordered the attack.