Storytelling at its best, this compelling memoir graphically portrays the scarred emotional landscape of young men who seek a place in the world by way of a military career. Exhausted shadows of the past are brought alive with uncommon eloquence as the author looks back on his youth brimming with innocence, idealism and patriotism. A page turner, the book explores the complex nature of a man whose brave, daring and sometimes foolhardy exploits led to the essential task; building a scaffold of choices and attitudes by rendering meaning from the intractable depths of experience. What in other hands might be a dreary tale of adolescent angst, betrayal and disillusion, takes on truly pyrotechnic energy, lifting his coming of age from the mundane to the profound.