WAR DEBRIS - Tales of the Old Army (ePub)

WAR DEBRIS - TALES OF THE OLD ARMY is an authentic collection of 21 short stories that reveal an uncommon perspective regarding military service. Candidly presented in graphic and uncompromising terms the work introduces an indelicate fictional approach to army life, vividly chronicled without pretense or sentimentality, during a previous era. The literary creations offer a blunt portrayal of rarely explored facets of military duty and its attending affairs. The author, Emmett E. Slake, a thirty-year veteran of the United States Army contains his fascinating fictional meanderings to the period of the early 1950s to the late 1970s in a diverse panorama of exotic global settings extending from home bases to overseas stations in Europe and Asia. Augmenting the spectacle, an array of sharply drawn characters emerge, adroitly framed in compelling situations that illuminate as well as entertain. The sordid aspects of conduct that often arise are starkly revealed without overt salaciousness. The mosaic of soldiers, civilians, and other assorted foreign personages preside and endure through a variety of intriguing and often tragic events in conditions hostile and benign. This melange of melodrama advances from harsh outposts in hazardous environs, manned by the subordinate levels of command, to the mundane social landscape of the privileged upper echelons of rank. All, are present and accounted for. To those who stood in the ranks and shared the joys, perils and heartbreaks, the stories will serve as a faded remembrance of their own narrow place in history.