The Second World War profoundly changed the people who fought in it. Bill Kress, a small-town Depression child, raised by his grandparents, became a part of that great drama just a few months after his graduation from high school. He enlisted mainly to delay his induction, but ironically, his enlistment actually brought him under the army's jurisdiction sooner than had he been drafted. Through his basic training and technical schooling to become an army medic, he was to learn that the army governed its people impersonally without regard for their desires, or even their imagined skills. There...