The Sunshine Soldiers

“Peter Tauber’s beautifully observed and hilarious diary of basic training as it is practiced in ‘the new action army’ is the most likeable work of lightly serious non-fiction I’ve read since The Strawberry Statement, a cool devastation of an institution one would have thought too thoroughly battered by this time to be worth expending any more ammunition on. Every draftee should equip himself with The Sunshine Soldiers and, just to even the contest, the Army should issue it to every officer and noncom who must deal with the troops. As for me, I stand in some small awe of Tauber’s achievement.” -----Richard Schickel, Harper’s “Lord, to think what twenty-odd years has done to Pvt, Hargrove.” -----George Plimpton “Does for Basic Training what Up the Organization tried to do for the corporate scene---blow the whistle on the whole stupid, phony, wasteful, counterproductive charade just by telling it like it is. Right on, Peter Tauber” -----Robert Townsend, author of: Up the Organization “For anyone who recalls his own military service with any reverence, it makes harrowing---if at times hilarious--- reading -----E. Roy Ray, Business Week “The Sunshine Soldiers is the most reasoned, and the best anti-military, pro-human book since All Quiet on the Western Front. Its humor is as black as that in Catch-22, and its grasp of military ‘reason’ is as complete.” ----- Eric Lax, The Texas Observer “. . . .the spirit of The Sunshine Soldiers--a daybook accounting of two months of basic training at one of the West’s most unpleasant bald spots, Fort Bliss-- is a blend of Lucky Jim and Catch-22.” ----- Robert Sherrill, New York Times Book Review