Fussell writes about an idyllic boyhood shattered by World War II - and the way the war experience changed his perspective on everything that came before and after.

His life began in Pasadena, California, a pastoral middle-class sanctuary almost untouched by the Great Depression. He went as an innocent to nearby Pomona College, where he learned about drink and women, and spent afternoons marching on the football field with the ROTC. And then, when the United States entered World War II, the spell was broken. At nineteen he joined the army and began the central event of his life.

He endured basic training, became a second lieutenant in the infantry, and, leading his platoon into battle, was seriously wounded. When he recovered, he vowed never to take orders again. His newly subversive sensibility would color all his later years, as a Harvard Ph.D. student, as a professor of literature, and as one of America's most distinguished commentators on twentieth-century life.