“Got the name? Play the game,” jokes Frank Warz, who has the name no matter how it’s spelled.

It’s 1975. The Vietnam War is all but over but not the recession, particularly in Detroit where Warz wishes he’d gone to Vietnam instead of college. Jobless when he’s not underemployed, Warz, who’s of tough Polish working-class stock, feels tricked out of a military destiny. So he perches on steel clothes-line poles in lightning storms to get a sense of what he missed in SE Asia and he poses as a decorated ex-Marine to feel like one. He takes great snapshots, though.

His hard luck turns awful though as disagreements get physical. One altercation even ends in a car crash with injuries. Warz is blameless but needs to leave the scene. On top of that, he is estranged from his two children.

One day a discarded newspaper casually informs him the French Foreign Legion is alive and well and living in the south of France. Finally, after a nudge from his WWI-hero grandfather, and after passing a self-administered test of nerve, Warz decides to apply to the Legion. The pardonable crash chases him to France.

During its screening process, the Legion introduces him to its severe world, which includes the French Territory of the Afars and Issas, Djibouti for short, a spot of hell, he hears, where the sun hammers rocks until they scream. Then the Legion rejects him.

Destitute, facing a fugitive’s homecoming, Warz steps on unexpected funds right after a strange daydream about finding money. The cash lets him get back on track. Intent on a fulfilling career, he buys an old camera and follows the Legion to Djibouti to make his mark as a combat photographer. Only now, he pretends to be a battle-seasoned “shooter” too.

Traveling through Ethiopia to save money, Warz has adventures that include close calls from nomads and hyena, and one from a young journalist who nearly unmasks Warz’ manufactured hero image. A bittersweet night with a married Swedish woman follows an unusual photo session with her. And in Djibouti, Warz gets a taste of what he came for while watching the Legion catch trespassers in a chaotic response that almost brings down an airliner. But the real excitement comes after he meets Cass, an African-American from Tennessee who is a Legion deserter.

The fine-featured Cass is convincingly disguised as a Somali sheik. He’s returning to Djibouti to help a legionnaire buddy escape on the Legion’s high holy day and in plain view of the whole garrison. The plan, though audacious, should work; however, it backfires in a racial face-off between Warz and Cass followed by a brutal action between legionnaires that catch them and a would-be warlord that catches them all.

Warz gets the action he’s always wanted, except it transcends anything his fantasies have prepared him for, including the consequences.

THE PLAY SOLDIER addresses the effects of racial, cultural and class division, depicts the ethos steeling the Foreign Legion’s own culture, and explores the underreported phenomenon of manufactured valor. But the novel’s overriding emphasis is on the attraction of the combat experience for those that will never go.