John Strang

Veterans of Foreign Whores: Military Life Between Korea and Vietnam: a Memoir of Company C, 25th Signal Battalion, Kaiserslautern, Germany, 1960-1964 John Strang

Set in the politically-incorrect early 1960s, Veterans of Foreign Whores recounts the experiences of teenage soldiers and their World War II-era soldier-mentors in the U. S. Army's biggest base of American servicemen abroad, Germany's Kaiserslautern-the GIs' notorious K-Town. Not quite the heroes of the Battle of the Bulge and not yet the dispirited generation of Vietnam, the men of Company C, 25th Signal Battalion string cable across western Germany-as they imbibe the local refreshments, spar with one another and sundry, and make the acquaintance of representatives of the gentler sex. While the Berlin Wall is raised and World War III is narrowly averted with the Soviet Union over Cuba, the innocents abroad wend their way from adolescence to young maturity, maybe no wiser for their experiences but undeniably riper.