This memoir is both for those who remember World II, and those to whom it is only history. Through the eyes of a teenage boy, comes a sensitive and detailed picture of life on the home front and death on the battlefield, during those tumultuous years from 1939 to 1945.

With emotional honesty, the narrative follows the author from toy soldiers in Iowa to basic training in Texas, through bloody battles in France to Hitler's Bavarian retreat at Berchtesgaden. Life and death become intimate and real throughout the dramatic transition from boyhood to manhood.