When former Confederate sergeant John Dyer sat down to write this engaging memoir, his goal was to tell the story of the rank and file soldiers who were mostly anonymous. What he wrote was an often witty, sometimes sad, but very good history of his time in the Kentucky 1st Cavalry Regiment. Through the entire war, Dyer and his comrades faced death by bullet, shell, and starvation, while managing to keep their spirits up in a losing cause. Of his former foes, he wrote: I write this from a Southern standpoint, but I can assure my brother who wore the blue that he will find nothing in these pages derogatory to the reputation of a brave and true soldier. The book is filled with plenty of thrilling action, and Dyer is very modest in his account of his own bravery.