No Time for Sergeants is a 1954 best-selling novel by Mac Hyman, which was adapted into a teleplay on The United States Steel Hour, a popular Broadway play and 1958 motion picture, as well as a 1964 television series.

An expanded version of the play, written by Ira Levin, opened on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre on October 20, 1955, produced by Maurice Evans and directed by Morton DaCosta.

King, Roddy McDowall played Will's army buddy Ben, and Don Knotts made his Broadway debut as Corporal Manual Dexterity.

Warner Bros. contract stars Nick Adams (as Stockdale's fellow draftee Benjamin B. Whitledge) and Murray Hamilton (as Irving S. Blanchard) joined the cast.

[2] Jackson won the role over several actors, including the better known Will Hutchins, a Warner Bros. Television contract star who formerly played the sympathetic Sugarfoot and had been in the No Time for Sergeants film.

[3] Unlike Jim Nabors's Gomer Pyle (of The Andy Griffith Show spin-off of the same name, inspired by No Time for Sergeants), Jackson's Stockdale was not unintelligent.

However, opposite The Andy Griffith Show, the series headlined by the original star of all the earlier versions of No Time For Sergeants, it was trounced in the ratings and only lasted one season.