Summary

Act I, Scene I: The play opens on a crowded train car in 1943. The coach car is full of young men on their way to basic training for the Army in Biloxi, Mississippi. The men are all from the East Coast and about twenty years old. The narrator, Eugene Morris Jerome, is the only one awake and he writes in his journal about his surroundings and the men he has met. Roy Selridge is from Schenectady, New York, and is rough around the edges. Eugene says that Selridge smells like a “tuna fish sandwich left out in the rain.” Selridge makes jokes about his private parts and lays into the other soldiers to try to get a laugh. Joseph Wykowski from Bridgeport, Connecticut has what Eugene describes as a “permanent erection” and is able to eat anything, including Hershey chocolate bars with...