A Simple Soldier

The United States Army drafted Steve in 1969. Like many young men, he was unaware of the consequences of being drafted until being sent to Vietnam. Although his father was also drafted into the Armed Forces for World War II, nothing could have prepared Steve for the year of duty to come. Growing up in a large family, he developed a talent early on for storytelling. His accounts of Vietnam will have you imagining him sitting across a campfire telling his story.

This is the story of Sepp Scheibenzuber, a simple man. For most of his early life, Sepp didnt make choices. Choices were made for him. At 13, he wanted to continue his schooling, but his parents had other ideas and soon he was toiling on the farms of Bavaria. Thereafter, he knew nothing else and so continued working on the land until he was drafted into the German Army. There was no question that he would go. He had never heard of anyone even contemplating avoiding the draft. And so within months he was fighting a war against Frenchman, a people whom he knew little about other than the Nazis said they were evil. And in the following years, he fought the Russians and suffered almost unendurable depravation. But somehow Sepp endured. He obeyed. He did what he was told along with millions of other Germans. It never even entered his mind that he had an alternative. All the choices were made for him, except one. He wanted to survive.

Elite paratrooper Sgt. Don Malarkey takes us not only into the World War II battles fought from Normandy to Germany, but into the heart and mind of a soldier who lost his best friend during the nightmarish engagement at Bastogne. Drafted in 1942, Malarkey arrived at Camp Toccoa in Georgia and was one of the one in six soldiers who earned their Eagle wings. He went to England in 1943 to provide cover on the ground for the largest amphibious military attack in history: Operation Overlord. In the darkness of D-day morning, Malarkey parachuted into France and within days was awarded a Bronze Star for his heroism in battle. He fought for twenty-three days in Normandy, nearly eighty in Holland, thirty-nine in Bastogne, and nearly thirty more in and near Haugenau, France, and the Ruhr pocket in Germany. Easy Company Soldier is his dramatic tale of those bloody days fighting his way from the shores of France to the heartland of Germany, and the epic story of how an adventurous kid from Oregon became a leader of men.

This is the story of Sepp Scheibenzuber, a simple man. For most of his early life, Sepp didn't make choices. Choices were made for him. At 13, he wanted to continue his schooling, but his parents had other ideas and soon he was toiling on the farms of Bavaria. Thereafter, he knew nothing else and so continued working on the land until he was drafted into the German Army. There was no question that he would go. He had never heard of anyone even contemplating avoiding the draft. And so within months he was fighting a war against Frenchman, a people whom he knew little about other than the Nazi's said they were evil. And in the following years, he fought the Russians and suffered almost unendurable depravation. But somehow Sepp endured. He obeyed. He did what he was told along with millions of other Germans. It never even entered his mind that he had an alternative. All the choices were made for him, except one. He wanted to survive.

Far From Home recounts the life of a soldier who grew up in 1920s Calgary and became an officer in the Canadian army who travelled the world. Williams offers a vivid retelling of growing up in Calgary during the depression. Williams transition from "the most untrained officer in the army" to an army officer at home in the Pentagon, along with the culture shock of moving from a relatively simple upbringing to the sophisticated life of an international officer, is told with great humour and rare insight into the human side of the military life.

How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war. Digging deeply into his soldiers' writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was "a common soldier" but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers' experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.