In his highly acclaimed Not in Vain, Leon C. Standifer recounted his experiences as a small-town Mississippi boy who at age nineteen found himself fighting as a combat infantryman in World War II France and Germany. Binding Up the Wounds carries the story beyond V-E Day to describe what the author saw, heard, felt, and learned as a member of the American occupation army in the homeland of its defeated enemy. Standifer, who served in the 94th Infantry Division in western Germany, the Sudetenland, and Bavaria in the first year of occupation, chronicles that unique and chaotic time from the viewpoint of a typical GI. Germany was an epic landscape of human need, ..

Growing up in a small college town in central Mississippi in the 1930s, Leon C. Standifer knew little of the trauma of war. But by the time he was nineteen, World War II had made war a reality for him. Standifer volunteered for and was accepted by a special army program that would send him to college for technical training; he sometimes hoped and some-times feared that the war would end before the training did. Events turned out quite otherwise. A serious shortage of trained riflemen needed for the invasion of Normandy meant that Standifer and more than one hundred thousand other young men were taken from the program and sent into battle as combat infantrymen. ..