When John Blaskiewicz entered the Army on March 17, 1943 he was eighteen years old. He knew that his mother would be upset when he told her that he had been drafted, which is exactly why he never told her that he had actually volunteered. From Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Missouri he was assigned to the 75^th Infantry Division.

Although he was trained as an artificer, he was soon transferred to the University of Akron to study as a bombardier on an aircrew. The critical shortage of infantrymen, however, cut his air training short and on the last day of August 1944 John arrived in France with a replacement depot. In mid-November he joined the 103^rd Infantry Division ("Cactus"), which had only recently assumed a place on the line. John celebrated VE-Day as a sergeant with these men in Innsbruck, Austria.

John, like many other veterans, never spoke about the war, and the more one reads about his unit's experience on the line the better one understands why. The only time he ever talked about the war was with other veteran buddies over beer, and for a long time these anecdotes represented the sum of his family's knowledge of John's war.

Even though he may not have been aware of it at the time, John authored a fantastic book during his years in the Army, a unique anthology, rich with short stories, poetry, history, sappily sincere love letters, bawdy jokes and marching cadences, a work probing the extremes of the human condition in more vivid and immediate detail than any man has ever successfully written. But nobody will ever read that wonderful, irretrievable book that he carried with him everyday. Examining the context in which it was written, however, offers a glimpse of what it must have been like.