http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/stand-up-virgin-soldiers-and-losorh...

This is the third novel in Leslie Thomas's Virgin Soldiers trilogy – drawing on his National Service experience as a non-combatant stationed in Singapore in the 1950s. The original Virgin Soldiers, published in 1966 and made into a film three years later, was pretty much a novel equivalent of much verse produced by soldiers in the trenches – it had the smell of reality about it, but didn't press too seriously at the experience of being a soldier. The emphasis was on the young soldiers' camaraderie and relatively innocent sexual adventures. The casual sexism, racism and homophobia, though not necessarily endorsed, went largely unchallenged, and there was just enough war stuff to remind the reader of the underlying reality. Times had changed by 1975 when this book was published: the US–Vietnam War was dragging to an end, on television M*A*S*H was in its third and fourth seasons, and feminist voices were being heard. In Australia, Eric Bogle's 'And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda' ('God help me / I was only nineteen') had been around for four years. The book, while still mainly featuring jolly japes among the non-combatants, takes a darker turn than its predecessors: we see glimpses of what lies behind the Chinese prostitute's cheerful façade; a character who shares many qualities with The Hurt Locker's protagonist is seen as anything but a hero; the muted homophobic humour is repudiated in a climactic scene, and so on. ( )