Defending My Bunk Against All Comers, Sir!

In a hilarious look back at the long-haired haze of college life in the early 1970s and how the draft lottery suddenly turned many young men's lives upside down, author Garret Mathews has written a humorous memoir of boot camp survival in his latest book from Rogers Publishing, Defending My Bunk Against All Comers, Sir! Garrett was among those unfortunate students of the "make love, not war" era of hippies, flower power and hair-down-to-there to draw a low draft lottery number. As a result, he is suddenly yanked from the blissful existence of a freewheeling college student and finds himself falling out in front of a drill sergeant with a cinder block for a forehead. This 180-degree lifestyle change that is basic training requires him to utilize his foremost survival technique: humor. As he and his squad mates struggle to learn the Army way of life, they sharpen their technique at tossing a grenade, firing a rifle and, of course, making their bunk - which in their eyes seems to be almost as important to the Pentagon as taking out an enemy fire base! "The Army is a melting pot where people of every shade of life are thrown together, and Mathews brings this pot to a boil, opening up vistas of behavior never before know to the civilized world," says Mort Walker, creator of the Beetle Bailey cartoon strip. "He is a very funny writer. This is a hilarious book."