"Nothing to Write Home About" is a lightly fictionalized memoir of a now distant period of recent American History, "The Cold War." In mid-1950s America, a rite of male passage was a couple of years of non-threatening, peacetime military service. By 1955, the war in Korea was two years past and Vietnam was still just a name. For the author, then aged eighteen, the Army offered an escape from the confines of a blue-collar neighborhood, a first opening on and into a larger world, a semi-grownup world filled with characters from all over the country, some good, some not so good and some just outlandish. Two years in the Army, with duty in South Carolina, Arkansas, Colorado and finally Germany became, unknowingly at the time, one of the genuinely educational and more memorable experiences of a lifetime.