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Rank Absurdity: An Irreverent Military Memoir
Sean Smith, author
Sean was a skinny teenager with one good eye and marginal athletic ability who hated camping. It never occurred to anyone who knew him that he’d pursue a career in the Army. Nevertheless, he was accepted to West Point, and almost flunked out immediately for being bad at gymnastics and analyzing poetry. Eventually he got a pretty good handle on being a cadet and graduated, only to embark on a military intelligence career that was a lot like a James Bond movie – if James Bond slept in tents, ate bad food, and chugged black coffee and antihistamines to get through the day.
Along the way Sean cut a brownie into seven equal slices while being screamed at, accidentally got high in the middle of law class, turned a UN base camp into a bed and breakfast for a VIP who wanted to go swim in a nearby lake, and helped call a simulated artillery strike on a West Texas cattle feeder. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In short, Rank Absurdity is a military memoir of a completely different stripe – frank and irreverent, told by someone with an inability to take themselves too seriously.