War College: It’s Complicated

It’s 1964, you’re a high school junior, and the Beatles just came to town. Getting your legs blown off by a mine in a jungle 8,000 miles away isn’t something you worry about. Basketball, making out with your girlfriend, and drinking beer on Friday nights are your real priorities.

But then you hear of a kid who got shot and died over there. Then more guys from the next town. Then your former best friend. All blown to hell. All really dead. A war in a place you’d never heard of only months before, is getting closer.

But eighteen-year-old Jon Taylor living the good life in San Diego isn’t worried. He has a plan. He’s gotten an appointment to the Naval Academy. After graduation, he’ll serve his five years, get his MFA from Yale, then pursue a writing career that will make him rich and famous.

Enter the Vietnam War, a duplicitous girlfriend, revoked Naval Academy appointment, low draft number, and Jon’s plans are destroyed. Like many of his friends.

War College follows the lives of six young men who come to Hiram Scott College in 1965. None of them ever dreamed they’d spend their freshman year in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, at a college no one had ever heard of. But it’s better than a Vietnam jungle. Maybe.

With poignancy, humor, music, and a story of fifty- year friendships, author Mark Donahue weaves a nostalgic tale that could only be told by someone who was there. As the title suggests, War College, like the Vietnam War, is complicated. A story steeped in historical fact, shining a light on both the horrors of war and the joys of youth.