Ignorant Army: How the Draft Made a Nice Young Man Into a Leftist Radical

This memoir is the true story of how a young man, while still technically deferred from the draft with a student deferment, was nonetheless drafted and entered the U.S. Army during the height of the Vietnam War. Although spared the Vietnam experience directly, he was himself nonetheless swept up in many of the same tensions and pressures of the war, even while stationed in the United States Army in Europe (USAREUR). Finding that the sheer incompetence and arbitrary nonsense inflicted by a largely indifferent leadership gradually drew him and his comrades into increasingly radical opposition to the authorities, he became a leader in the barracks, defending his friends to the extent he was given the nickname of "The General." Along the way, he became the disc jockey for a pirate radio station and helped prevent the first full-scale mutiny in the USAREUR, only to be later persecuted for his trouble.