"Soft-Boiled Sergeant" chronicles a young soldier's entry into basic training into the US military shortly before the United States entered World War II.
The other two stories were “Both Parties Concerned (submitted as “Wake Me When It Thunders”) and “Last Day of the Last Furlough.”)[4] While Salinger was in Europe preparing with the 12th Infantry Regiment for the D-Day invasions, he discovered that the Post had changed the title of the work from “Death of a Dogface” to “Soft-boiled Sergeant” without consulting him.
[7] According to biographer Kenneth Slawenski, Salinger “swore he never again deal with the slicks, regardless of how much they paid.”[8][9] “The true story of the ugly , unphotogenic Burke, the ‘soft-boiled sergeant,’ provides a sobering antidote to Hollywood’s fantasy portrayals.
[11] Literary critic John Wenke offers this monologue from protagonist Philly Barnes: Juanita, she’s always dragging me to a million movies, and we see these shows all about war and stuff.
[12]Salinger provides this eulogy to his character Burke in which the life and death of the soldier serve as a “counterpoint” to all romanticized movie versions of war:[13] He died all by himself, and he didn’t have no message to give to no girl or nobody, and there wasn’t nobody throwing a big classy funeral for him here in the States, and no hotshot bugler blowed taps for him.