In this memoir of his experiences as a teenage infantryman in the US Third Army during World War II, Kotlowitz brings to life the harrowing story of the massacre of his platoon in northeastern France, in which he-by playing dead-was the only one to survive. "This memoir does a superb job of sympathizing with all those puzzled boys, dead well before their time." "Combat soldiers' memories are like flames or waves on a beach; they seem the same, but their patterns are always changing. Robert Kotlowitz…has produced…the model for such memories…[A] superb narrative." "His straightforward prose captures both the mundane and the horrific features of a soldier's life, as well as his own teenager's naivete…An unsentimental, honest testament to the individual experience of war-the kind that history overlooks." "Kotlowitz writes with skill and mordant humor of the infantryman's life, of the incredible instinct to survive, of 'the sounds…never before heard'… His fine memoir belongs on readers' shelves alongside such books as Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers and Paul Fussell's Doing Battle, primary documents of a terrible time."
