SOMETHING ABOUT A SOLDIER (1986)

Random House, 1986 Autobiography "When I first started writing this account I thought it would be fairly short, but I can see as I get into it that I remember much more than I thought I would. One incident keys another, and long conversations come back to me in their entirety. There's no trick to this ability to recall things, and anyone can do it. If you pick up an item you had in childhood, a teddy bear, for example, and stare at hard enough, concentrating, you'll be able to remember events that happened when you were only three years old, little things you didn't even know you knew. So that's always a problem when a man's trying to write something: what to put in and what to leave out. Although everything that ever happens to a person is important in one way or another, what that person remembers might bore the hell out of a reader. And I don't want to bore readers -- not intentionally, anyway."

This funny, rich, raunchy autobiography re-creates the adventures of a very young soldier in the U.S. Army at the height of the depression. Charles Willeford was sixteen in 1935 when he signed up and was sent to the Philippines. And the Philippines of those days was like a place out of another century. Willeford's job was to fuel aircraft whose pilots treated him and his buddies almost like slaves. At night, however, he was a lord, fully exploring a great, timeless and sensual city with a multitude of women available -- even on a private's pay.

While still in his teens, Charles Willeford had an artist's eye for the interesting detail, and he recalls here, with telling effect, the hardest of times and introduces the reader to the unusual companions he met along the way. He also initiates the reader into an exotic, leisurely way of life that will never be seen again in or out of the Armed Services.

Willeford wanted to leave the army after his tour of duty, but there still were no jobs, and he re-enlisted, this time in the cavalry of California, where he learned about horses the Army way.

Perfect in its depiction of an often brutish way of life -- and the colorful mingling of unfettered boys, bitter old men, and even intellectuals -- Something About a Soldier is a rare portrait of a vanished army.

"Anyone who doesn't recognize this as fine writing doesn't know shit." - Elmore Leonard

"Something About a Soldier is a remarkable recreation of a young soldier's recollection of a peacetime era now far in the past. Lively and unrestrained, Charles Willeford's revealing pages will be relished by both old soldiers and today's civilians. The author has a way with his writing that makes the reader a participant." - Erskine Caldwell

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