The Useless Servants — Rolando Hinojosa

In The Useless Servants, award-winning author Rolando Hinojosa captures the obscenity and pointlessness of war in the pages of a Korean War journal written by his fictional everyman, Rafe Buenrostro. Drawing from his own experiences, Hinojosa probes the mind of this Texas country boy who suddenly finds himself in an unknown country fighting in an undeclared war for an unknown reason. Meeting and befriending an unending stream of people who are gone as suddenly as they appear, Rafe alternately fears for his life and is bored to death. Dehumanized by the horrors that surround him, Rafe latches onto the one thing that offers hope for survival: his diary. He records his observations laconically and without emotion in a routine geared to survival and to becoming more effective in the performance of his grisly duty as an artilleryman.