This better-than-average military memoir is the story of an NCO of the famous Easy Company that historian Stephen Ambrose dubbed Band of Brothers. Raised in the Pacific Northwest, Malarkey first vividly recounts growing up during the Depression, following up with paratrooper training and the exhausting physical regimen that went with it, not to mention the departure of Easy Company’s first commander. A sea voyage and life in England preceded the jump into Normandy, at which point the narrative almost attains the level of Donald Burgett’s Currahee! (1967). Malarkey jumped into the Netherlands thereafter and, like so many other paratroopers, fought for months in static warfare such as he hadn’t expected to face. Malarkey ended the war at Bastogne, where even his hardened veteran’s morale sagged to the point of considering a self-inflicted wound just to get out of the frozen hell of the place. Shelve this with the classic accounts of the infantryman’s war.