Close Enough for Jazz: Out of Step with Sgt Protzinger's Flying Beerhall Brass band and Noise Machine

Army Days, #1

This book continues my peacetime Army adventures begun with Single Striper and chronicles a time of going through the motions with one's brain half asleep and no ostensible purpose guiding our actions other than keeping the military machine from going to rust.

Luckily, a few of us found a niche playing music instruments in a wacky outfit called the Kitzingen Area Band, which freed us from the usual tedium of soldiering and let loose the unruly civilian in us. The immediate Army through which we carelessly strolled, however, cast a jaundiced eye on our unmilitary bearing and sought ways of infiltrating our ranks.

Then a birthday greeting card for a tuba player named Stretch arrived from the White House, signed by his Gettysburg friend and neighbor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the wacky dance began . . .