First Sergeant Buford

Nathaniel “How could I know” Flowers arrives at his new duty assignment, Kleinelachen Air Base, Germany, and immediately gets himself in a heap of trouble with his new first shirt. He follows that by going on a three-day bender with his new barracks mate Dylan. He awakens, profoundly hung over, to his folie a trois: standing in front of the squadron commanding officer, AWOL. How can this be? Clearly, Nate has violated his recently learned lesson, taught by Bob Dylan, not to make the same mistake more than once. But Nate, while creative enough to reconfigure his mistakes to some extent, remains a major screw-up. The difference here, on this tiny American air base near Stuttgart, appears to be that–at least so far–everyone he’s met is a wacko. Why does Dylan call the squadron office “The Dungeon?” Why was Nate sleeping with an empty Heineken bottle in his pocket? And how did that fancy chronograph end up on his wrist?