This book immediately grabbed my attention by introducing itself, quite lucidly, with a discussion of personal memory and its notoriously complex relationship with facts. Long ago, I had been schooled on the difference of recalling a "normal" event and that of reliving a "significant emotional experience" and how much more vivid, though not necessarily more broadly encompassing it may be. The author sets the stage candidly for where he is coming from and then launches into a memoir of his experience in the armed forces fighting the Japanese in Burma during World War II. While the setting is clearly different, I found myself frequently thinking of my experiencing Robert Lewis Stevenson's Treasure Island, so many decades ago. This was a real adventure, and it brought back the feeling I had so very long ago reading my first fictional adventure. The author's style brings the reader right along with him through each setting. The reader becomes part embedded reporter and part individual hearing someone tell a story in a relaxed gathering of friends. The story shifts gear often with healthy doses of humor and suspense, never flagging in its ability to maintain interest. An extra bonus comes with the author relating his war experiences to veterans of the first Iraq War which had occurred just before he wrote the book. It was rather remarkable how much of what he had to say applied every bit as well today. I certainly can see people reading this book or not based purely on it being a book about war, but I think those that bypass it will miss the insight that relates so keenly to how humans have everyday life experiences.

Quartered Safe Out Here is one the of the quintessential infantry memoirs, a tale of six months with Nine Section in Burma in 1944 and 1945. Fraser, of course has won lasting popularity as the author of the Flashman series, and he brings all his literary weight to this memoir. It's really about the ten or so men of Nine Section, grousing Cumbrian bandits in the finest tradition of their Boarder Riever ancestors. The rolling Cumbrian dialect, the complaints and arguments, the stand-tos and patrols and attacks, all come through.

Memory is a fickle thing, and tentpoles of fervent adrenaline in assaults on bunkers and desperate night actions and interspersed with long periods where nothing much happens, or nothing that could have stood out to be remembered 50 years later. And as with the Burma Campaign as a whole, it was the last brave show of the British Empire, where an army composed of Gurkhas and Sikhs and innumerable other Indian ethnicity, with madcap East African convoy drivers, and regiments from some specific English county, slugged it out with the cream of the Japanese army in the trackless jungle hills. There's glory, and humor, and jungle sores and malaria and dusty marches.

I could have done with fewer complaints about modern society having gone to the dogs, but Fraser is entitled to his pint and his grousing, because the story is incredible. Just a fantastic book.

Matt says, "Memoir of a 19 year-old serving in the British army during WWII's Burma campaign. Most Americans know little of the war in Burma. The storytelling and the dialect are great. The characters are wonderful."