"6.
Your moral compass
should be red-light readable
for work in the dark."

from 'a quiet professional professes through haiku'

There are many gems scattered through this collection that those who've been there will immediately laugh in recognition and those who haven't will get a richer sense of the diverse emotions, hard truths laced with humor, much more than many of the media-generated generalizations can grasp, that come with the veteran's life. ( )

SO FRAG & SO BOLD is a thoroughly delightful - and thought provoking - little tome, filled with clever turns of phrase, humor and wisdom. Its comic book-ish cover depicting a hybrid combo of a human heart and a grenade is at once weird and um, well, appropriate, I guess. War writer Randy Brown (aka Charlie Sherpa) weaves his usual magic in these extremely brief 'poems,' haikus and sometimes seemingly random thoughts. Perhaps my favorite is "a Musing," with its two lines: "what do artists call / a group of friends" . Another might be "Winchester," with its "are we done / when we fire / nothing but / blank sheets" . ('Winchester,' btw, is military radio code for "we're out of ammo."). Reading this one, I couldn't help but think of all the white space, or nearly blank sheets throughout this little book, and wondered why a smaller, maybe even shirt-pocket-size format wasn't used. To save paper, ya know? And the haikus? Yes, Randy, I did find myself counting syllables. As in "the only glory / one should seek is the respect / of one's on soldiers" (in "a quiet professional professes through haiku"). Five, seven, five. Yup, seventeen. Sorry, can't help myself. And yes, there is a blank sheet at the end of this collection, so I guess you were done.

I read this little book in about twenty minutes, and going slow at that. Then I read it again. And again. Plenty to think about here, and I did. And I enjoyed the hell outa these 'poems.' Thanks for all of them, Randy. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA. ( )