John Bandy

When Whippoorwills Call John Bandy

A 16 year-old high school dropout leaves home to avoid incarceration in a Juvenile Court Detention Center for placement in an orphanage. Using a falsified birth certificate he enlists in the army where he finds himself in an extremely hostile environment. Seeking refuge in the army, he discovers that he cannot run away from himself or escape the family curse. As a member of the elite United States Army Constabulary in occupied-Germany, he faces the greatest challenge of his life amid the war torn ruins of a conquered nation. The book describes, in lurid detail, the misadventures of the men in the lower echelons of the military establishment and the effects of their relationships with the German populace. As a fraudulent enlistee, he lives in constant fear of being discovered. He is further plagued by premonitions of doom by the family "curse", the result of an unconscionable sin committed by his maternal grandfather. Born into an impoverished, dysfunctional family in the middle of the Great Depression, he struggles to overcome the indoctrination of inferiority and social ostracism resulting from his mother's alcoholism. The story traces the family history from his ancestors' 19th century Mississippi plantation to the early 1950s in segregated Birmingham, Alabama.