Darryl Ponicsan's debut novel The Last Detail was named one of the best of the year and widely acclaimed, catapulting him to fame when it was first published. The story of two career sailors assigned to escort a young seaman from Norfolk to the naval prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—and of the mayhem that ensues—it was made into an award-winning movie starring Jack Nicholson. Last Flag Flying, set thirty-four years after the events of The Last Detail, brings together the same beloved characters—Billy Bad-Ass Buddusky, Mule Mulhall, and Meadows—to reprise the same journey but under very different circumstances. Now middle-aged, Meadows seeks out his former captors in their civilian lives to help him bury his son, a Marine killed in Iraq, in Arlington National Cemetery. When he learns that the authorities have told him a lie about the circumstances of his son's death, he decides, with the help of the two others, to transport him home to Portsmouth. And so...

From the author of The Last Detail and Last Flag Flying, a surreal comic novel in the tradition of Joseph Heller about movies, small town politics, and a place between heaven and hell. Following a rewrite job in New York City, veteran screenwriter D. K. Kecskeméti finds himself not in his home in the Hollywood Hills but in an unfamiliar house in a strange town, where he's greeted by an obsequious houseman who informs that his wife, Hope, is gone. The note she left reveals that she's on a retreat to deal with a personal crisis of which DK was unaware. Confused and disoriented, unable to sleep, he wanders the deserted streets. He comes upon three cops, guns drawn, at the open doorway of a residence. When the doorway fills with a blinding light, they open fire. The victim falls right next to DK. She is a beautiful black woman, who happens to be naked . . . and an angel. She folds her wings as she utters her last words: "Hope is alive."In the...

Unlike other branches of the armed services, the Navy draws it police force from the ranks, as temporary duty called Shore Patrol. In this funny, bawdy, moving novel set during the height of the Vietnam War, two career sailors in transit in Norfolk, Virginia—Billy "Bad-Ass" Buddusky and Mule Mulhall—are assigned to escort eighteen-year-old Larry Meadows from Norfolk to the brig in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he is to serve an eight-year sentence for petty theft. It's good duty, until the two old salts realize the injustice of the sentence and are oddly affected by the naive innocence of their young prisoner. In the five days allotted for the detail, they decide to show Meadows something of the life he doesn't yet know, to help him survive the long ordeal ahead and to purge their own shame. What follows is an unlikely road trip by bus and train up the Eastern seaboard and an indelible journey of initiation and discovery, filled with beer-soaked wisdom, big city...