Is military service a sacred duty and an honorable duty or a tedious duty and wasted years? The author of the collection “Peculiarities of National Garrison Service”, who knows army life firsthand, and, as they say, from the inside, offers his own answer - uniquely interested, sometimes philosophically deep, and sometimes filled with subtle irony and sparkling humor. By creating seemingly disparate stories in time and space about his own service as a private, sergeant and officer, V. Preobrazhensky, in fact, presents to the reader a story that is holistic in ideological and artistic terms. A kind of “encyclopedia of army life” over the last quarter of a century, which gently and unobtrusively offers us very funny and quite serious interpretations of military service. The book is intended for a wide range of readers, primarily for those who, like the author himself, , has army experience behind him.