A Boy's War

In his first book of memoirs, BEING A BOY, we met a young Paxton Davis growing up in North Carolina during the Depression. A BOY'S WAR continues his story as he leaves for college and his "Rat Year" at the Virginia Military Institute. He was going not to prepare for war, but simply to continue a family tradition.

But this was wartime, and soon the army beckoned. Picked for the medics, Davis describes his odyssey through disease and death. He relates his experiences and shows us how luck, fatigue and fear played leading roles in determining soldier's fates during a war fought mostly by boys, many of whom learned far more than they cared to about life and death before reaching voting age.