Shep's Army: Bummers, Blisters and Boondoggles

Fun read and interesting insight into Shep’s Army life. Would recommend to anyone interested in Jean Shepherd. Very enjoyable read

For those who have read and enjoyed Shep's other writing, this one is a bit different.I'd just expected a compilation of the Army tales from his Playboy Magazine days, written with his broad senseof humor and sarcastic wit, but I was surprised to discover a darker Jean Shepherd here... still with a keen eye forthe absurd and ironic in life, but there's much more here.We get a sense of what it was like to get drafted into the WW2 Green Machine... Shep tells the tale of just howdehumanizing it is to become a small, insignificant cog among the millions in the Army. He shares his personalstory of how he survived it all, both figuratively and literally, by his own wits.There IS, to be sure, much of the usual Shep humor in this, as well as the boredom and frustration of everydaylife in the service, punctuated by the few minutes of excitement as he gets to do what he was sent to theFlorida Everglades to do... his RADAR company actually detects a German submarine off the Florida coast, andfrom a safe and boring distance he watches a single and now long forgotten battle between the sub, and oiltanker, and a Piper Cub of the Civil Air Patrol.It definitely a different side of Shep, and an interesting one. Worth the time to read... it's a true tale from thebelly of the beast.

Eugene Bergmann has put together an amazing collection of Army stories that were told by Jean Shepherd on his nightly radio show that aired for over two decades. He has done a painstaking job of transcribing and grouping these stories into a near perfect chronology spanning from induction to the transition back to civilian life.These tales give us a poignant and humorous look at the pain, drudgery and monotony of life in the military as only Shepherd can tell it. I know the diehard Jean Shepherd fans out there will buy this book. I implore anyone who is not as familiar with his work to pick it up. It is a great sampling of the works of one of the greatest American humorists of the 20th century. Once you've whet your palate with these stories you will want to seek out all of Shepherd's earlier publications as well. Thank you, so much, Mr. Bergmann for helping to keep the legacy of this brilliant storyteller alive.

Enter the storyteller. It is his job to remember not merely great events or funny punchlines; but also to make real the common events that remind the old and illuminate for the young what the business of living is about. This is the role that Jean Shepherd took up and in which he excelled. Most people met Jean Shepherd via his very successful movie Christmas Story . The movie is drawn from several of his published short stories and is narrated by Jean AKA "Shep".I had first come to know of Jean Shepherd either through his brief television show Jean Shepherd's America or the WOR New York portion of his radio days. His was a time when talk radio did not have to be shock jock or political storm and thunder. The great skill of Jean Shepherd both in his published works and in his live radio broadcasts was not merely that he placed you into a world you may not have known but you share his passion for that world.Shep's Army is a set of transcripts from Jean Shepherd's radio shows focused on his Army experiences in World War II. He served as an enlisted man about as far from the fighting front has anyone stationed in America could be. Transcript editor Eugene B. Bergmann writes the introduction Shep's stories are not to be read as strictly autobiography. Even so the apparent confusion over whether Shepherd served in the Army Signal Corps or the occasionally mentioned `mess kit repair company' is clearly confusion on the editors part. Anyone with direct military experience would recognize that the mess kit repair company was an inside joke invented by someone in his company to cut off the repetitive questions civilians might ask of a Signal Corps Radar operator.In roughly 30 stories Shep relates the boredom, the largely unwanted alternatives to boredom and the arbitrary existence of a war time EM (enlisted man). Because these were radio broadcasts he works hard to avoid the authentic crude language of that life. Even so you come to feel the cold and the tension of his experience.Shep's Army is not humor. It can be funny, it is also disconcerting. The two things come across consistently . Firstly, how completely different being in uniform is from being out. Secondly, Shep's loneliness. Nowhere in here is the talk of instant, lifelong comradeship. This is not the stuff of typical military hijinks that might lampoon his disordered experiences. This is the panoply of human reactions to a highly ordered life that was meant to prepare you for unexpected events.Shep's Army allows you to experience the humorous and the ordinary. Lighter stories tend to be highly detailed and explained. Tragic and near tragic events tend to be more simply described, allowing you to see them in stark contrast. This is good story telling. These are the honest tales of an observant story teller.

Jean Shepherd was probably one of the greatest American humorists since mark Twain. His stories about growing up in a steel-mill town in Northern Indiana during the 1930's and 1940s are funny, poignant and utterly charming and his book "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (and Other Disasters)" Is a book to cherish and to read over and over again. Unfortunately, this effort, which are a bunch of anecdotes about his Army Days in the Signal Corps during WW2, is simply not in the same league. Transcribed from Shepherd's Radio show in the 1960's (WNYC, IIRC), the stories have a stream of consciousness tone about them which might have been amusing to those listening, but are just plain awkward to read. That's not to say that the book doesn't entertain, It's just that to one used to the side-splitting narratives of Shepherd's earlier written works, this one falls flat.