One Soldier Three Wars details the military career of Lt. Col. Fred W. Wilmot, a soldier who fought his first war when most men his age were planning their senior proms. A small-town boy with perhaps an exaggerated opinion of his own importance, Fred found that he was really quite ordinary and that war was not the glamorous game he had come to play.

 

Near the end of World War II, he developed his own model for a real soldier, shrugged off the shiny tapestry of the parade-ground cadet, and went his own way. The Korean War led him back to the hell of infantry combat, but opened the door for a new method of waging war, a war of words. Fred studied propaganda and behavior manipulation tactics, helping to develop the U. S. military's psychological warfare division.

 

As the war in Vietnam was just beginning, he thought he had masked a shot at preventing "apocalypse now" but found that his ideas were born too soon and were overshadowed by lethargy and the conventional approach to war.