Guard of Honor

Summary

Compressed into three days at an Army Air Forces base in wartime Florida, the novel traces a cascade of small crises—an aviation mishap, a racial incident, bureaucratic infighting—that test the base's senior commander and his staff. Cozzens favors dense, ironic prose and a wide ensemble, treating war as a sprawling administrative problem rather than a battlefield epic. Critics have long admired its formal control and clear-eyed view of institutional life under pressure.