the book, I remembered a discussion we had in classabout whether or not the soldiers were considered as individuals. Guidryexplained how military thought of them: “ To them we were just parts of the machine, nodifferent from cannons or jeeps. We were superfluous;they were there to fill their clipboards. Apparently,nobody wanted to stop the infiltration, because it resultedin a steady stream of favorable statistics, a couple dozenkills a week at very little cost. That looked good foreverybody, and might even mean promotions for thelower ranking officers. But down in the ranks, those ofus wit our faces in the mud knew that thinking was notgoing to win the war”4 His book is full of accounts of superiors putting the troops in dangerwhen there was clearly a better way, and hiding in foxholes leaving thesoldiers without a leader to tell them what to do. So many injustices weredone in fact that a Lieutenant was murdered, and Guidry and his troopplanned to murder theirs. Bouncing Back was a more inspirational book. The characters hadreason to live, even though they were trapped in POW camps. They dreamtof a better place, and fought the interrogators as hard as they could. Theyset up a tapping code to communicate along the walls, and would even teacheach others the things that they had studied in college. The interesting thing about the book is the way the Air Force pilots livetheir lives when they weren’t fighting as compared to the Marines. Theylivedin air-conditioned rooms. Three square meals a day, as compared to theMarines who had one ration a day (on a good day), and half a ration everyother day during long battles where they could not get food into thebattlefield. For Al Stafford (the main POW in Bouncing Back), however, the goodlife ended only three weeks after he entered the war. After being hit frombehind by a SAM missile he ejected from them plane. “ He used his survivalradio to make one transmiss...
