A SOLDIER AGAINST ALL ODDS

A United States Army officer battles a learning disability, office politics, and his own worst instincts in Pike’s memoir.

The author, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, begins his narrative with his boyhood in Georgia and South Carolina, describing his struggle with a learning disability that made it difficult for him to read, write, or absorb complex instructions. At loose ends, he joined the Army National Guard in 1982 at the age of 17 and endured a brutal stint of basic training under a sadistic drill sergeant, an ordeal that instilled in him the conviction that “nothing is impossible if you can get enough training.” Pike applied that dictum to simple matters like making his bed and fieldstripping his M16, then to more complex tasks like completing college and earning two postgraduate degrees. He continued on to a military career as an Army entomologist and medical officer responsible for sanitation, hygiene, and combating insect-borne illnesses, eventually commanding units in South Korea and Afghanistan. But he continued to struggle with setbacks, including a DUI arrest (which could have ended his career if not for some adroit bureaucratic maneuvering) and a feud with colleagues that culminated in false charges of pedophilia and spying. As he unspools this history, the author also pays colorful tribute to his hardscrabble family—particularly his father, a sales executive who escaped dire poverty but retained a roguish streak that he inculcated in his son through watermelon-stealing lessons and a rough-and-ready attitude (“He liked a man who played football or baseball, because that meant he was a team player, and if making that touchdown required a fist to the balls or a handful of sand in the eyes, he had no problem with that”).

Pike delivers a canny, wised-up, decidedly unheroic portrait of military service, told from the perspective of an insider who does his duty as well as he can while understanding that the key to success is learning to navigate power plays and manipulate ponderous Army bureaucracy (he once managed to get an application for a transfer processed by the expedient of attaching a $1 bill to the paperwork to catch a clerk’s eye). In his telling, he was simultaneously a shrewd operator and a compulsive, sometimes self-defeating maverick who was forever getting chewed out, both by superiors and low-ranking subordinates. (“Sir! You are an officer! Why would you steal an enlisted person’s lunch?”). The narrative is full of hang-dog comedy, from a tumble into a cesspool to an Airborne School hazing ritual (“In my case, I had to stand naked in the doorway of an aircraft…holding on to the sides that had been rigged with an electrical current”), all rendered in pungent prose with vivid, absurdist detail rooted in evocative, sharply observed psychology and vivid characterizations (“His was a microworld, a fiefdom slowly built over many years, almost like an academic version of Apocalypse Now,” he writes of one entomologist rival; “He had a way of ingratiating and smiling that did nothing to hide his fury”). Pike perseveres with good humor and a persistent belief that service in the military was worth the travails and indignities he suffered along the way.

An engrossing, warts-and-all view of Army life, simultaneously irreverent and inspiring.