Grunt's Minutia

When Ruben Dann is drafted out of a dead-end job delivering furniture, he hopes the army will teach him a useful trade. Instead he finds himself in another dead-end job, in the infantry, being herded around the battlefield by sergeants and officers, searching for an elusive enemy he doesn't want to find. Vesuvio in San Francisco will present an evening of readings from "Grunt's Minutia," Jack Yaghubian's account of sixteen days as a soldier in Vietnam, at 7 pm on Tuesday May 22. The program will be free, open to anyone 21 and older. Yaghubian, a longtime bartender legendary among North Beach pub crawlers who know him as "Jack the Hat," based the book on his own experiences on the DMZ in the fall of 1969. Alternately hysterical and harrowing, it follows 20-year-old "Ruben Dann" as he is transformed from a green draftee from a California beach town into a man who learns the hard way how to deal with war and death. Vesuvio is at 255 Columbus Ave. at Jack Kerouac Alley. For more information, please call (415) 362 3370.