Before the Colors Fade is Lawrence R. Stack's attempt to provide his children and grandchildren with an account of what it was like to be an ambitious young man in the America of the early 1950s. Stack wanted to become a soldier, just like the heroes of his youth. This book describes how he managed to achieve that goal, and it tells of the many fascinating people he met along the way. He writes of the stresses and the exhilaration of war, as well as of his later sojourns in the world of American business, which really proved to be just another form of war zone.