Mailer deserves credit for courage, both personal and literary. First, at an early stage of the March, he chose to be arrested, as a symbol of outrage against the Vietnam War. Many media and literary superstars of the era attended the March, but nearly all prudentially avoided arrest or detainment by authorities. Of the one thousand arrests during the weekend of demonstrations, all but a few were kids.

The March om the Pentagon spanned three days, and Mailer takes through Friday (burning of draft cards at the Department of Justice), Saturday (the Day of the March and Mailer's incarceration in the State of Virgina's correctional system) and, finally, Sunday (Mailer is released on his own recognizance and the last demonstrators leave the Pentagon grounds).

Mailer's first person account shows us why all first person accounts of historic events are limited and flawed. From his position on the front line of demonstrators during the Saturday March, Mailer cannot see ninety percent of what is happening, and acknowledges his state of ignorance to his readers. Additionally, he is thrown into the slammer so early that weekend that he cannot report on subsequent events (he does overhear pieces of unreliable prison gossip).

In the fat middle section of the book, Mailer recounts the monotony of prison life, talks to his cellmates (mostly students and hippies), chats with his wife long distance by phone, and meditates on the history of America and the justness of the War. It is a measure of Mailer's literary skill that the reader does not grow impatient to learn the outcome and the ultimate success or failure of the March taking place outside prison walls. Mailer's mind fascinates.

The last third of the book provides a second example of Mailer's courage -- this time, literary courage. It is a detailed, journalistic, hour-by-hour account of the Weekend which Mailer does NOT witness. In effect, the book begins again. Mailer pulls together and synthesizes reports from the radical press and reports from mainstream sources, such as The Washington Post and CBS News.

He gives us a capsule history of the planning and organization of the March, which took several months to complete (the March was organized by east coast moderate, David Dellinger, editor of LIBERATION magazine, and west coast radical and future Yippie, Jerry Rubin). Mailer shows us how the U.S. government worked with March organizers and accomodated many of their requests, fearful of what a large scale riot in the nation's capital might do to world opinion and the political future of the Johnson dministration.

Finally, in the last thirty pages of ARMIES OF THE NIGHT, Mailer provides a second example of literary courage. When the celebrities leave the Pentagon grounds on Saturday afternoon, after a few hours of polite speech making and chanting, for photo-ops and plane rides to NYC and LA, the real story begins.

Out of two hundred thousand demonstrators at the March's start, only a thousand or so remained by Saturday night. They set up camp fires surrounding the Pentagon, forming the Night Armies of the book's title. At three AM on Sunday morning, after TV camermen and journalists had left, police, without provocation, began clubbing and arresting demonstrators. The establishment had had enough. Protestors offered no resistance. Most of those clubbed were women, apparently a pre-arranged tactic to humiliate the male "peaceniks." The result -- a few hundred men and women were carried off and the rest remained through the night.

According to an agreement between March organizers and the Government, the March would officially end at midnight Monday morning. At that hour, the police led off the last protestors, who went without violence. It was a quiet ending to a tumultuous day, and, arguably, the finest day in the history of the Counter Culture.

And, Mailer admits that he missed it and that he should have been there, instead of cooling in jail. Most accounts of that weekend, written up in the days afterward, mention only the First Day. Which proves the old adage: history is what happens after the offical account ends. But Mailer got it right.