Old Man in a Baseball Cap

August 30, 1999
While the public appears eager for sweeping, heroic histories of the "greatest generation," readers would do themselves a disservice to ignore this ground-level view of WWII written by a member of that generation blessed with superb storytelling skills and a survivor's sense of the absurd. This book version of Rochlin's critically acclaimed one-man show of the same name offers a look at WWII that is by turns horrifying, sobering and hilarious. At times, it reads like Catch-22, except it's not fiction. Rochlin was 19 when he joined the Army Air Corps in 1942. His drill sergeant explained how the army decided that Rochlin would be trained as a navigator: "Look, everybody knows you Hebes are good with numbers, and all a navigator is, is just a fucken flying accountant." His duties turned out to include finding a boyfriend for the colonel in charge of his base in Italy after he himself had rebuffed the colonel's advances. And then there was the combat: on his first mission, billed as "a milk run": his plane was hit, the nose gunner fell out and Rochlin wound up covered in the blood of his roommate and bombardier, whose head was blown off. On one of his last missions, his plane was shot down over Yugoslavia and he had to hike for 30 days back to Italy. Along the way, he was forced by Yugoslav Partisans to execute three Nazis point blank, and contracted VD from his walking partner, a Partisan whose seduction routine consisted of announcing that she didn't want to die a virgin. A retired architect who lives in Los Angeles, Rochlin was 71 when he took a storytelling workshop with Spalding Gray. The well-deserved encouragement he received led him to hone his recollections for the theater. The stories retain their power in book form. Dramatic rights to Disney.

August 30, 1999
Rochlin, a WWII combat veteran, developed this wartime memoir after taking a storytelling workshop from monologuist Spalding Gray. Adopting Gray's form of free-associational autobiographical remembrance, he compiled--through the act of live delivery--a collection of spoken pieces about his experiences as an Army Air Corps navigator flying missions over Germany. Describing his own generation of 70- to 80-year-old men, he notes: "A lot of us went through a lot of stuff that we've been unable to talk about." Once uncorked, Rochlin's stories flowed blunt, irreverent and coarse--hardly the expected misty-eyed history. Most dramatic, he tells of being shot down over Yugoslavia, being rescued while injured by a female partisan and walking to Italy only at night over several weeks. Along the way, he is forced to execute three Germans ("Jesus Christ, I didn't want to shoot anybody") and coerced into having sex by his syphilis-bearing companion, who has asked him to "make fig-fig." The audio book offers an unusual sense of unembellished exuberance expressed through the author's conscious act of performance. Based on the 1999 HarperCollins hardcover.