[Little_shoe]

I really loved that book, though I didn't pick it up until after the movie came out. But when I did discover it I read it over and over and over. Starship Troopers, Enders Game, Captain Blood, and the Count of Monte Cristo have to be the most read of my whole book collection.

He has this chanty used for saluting guns at the start of one of the chapters.
"He's bound to be guilty 'r he wouldn't be here!
Starboard gun . . . FIRE!
Shooting' too good for 'im, kick the louse out!
Port gun . . . FIRE!"
- Ancient chanty used to time saluting guns

When I was at the Academy during the parades I would repeat that to myself during gun salutes. I personally enjoyed the chapter "The man who was too lazy to fail" in his book "Time Enough For Love". It allowed me to see what the academy was like when he was going there back in the 1930s.

[Little_shoe]

The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail concerns a 20th-century U.S. Navy cadet who manages to move up the ranks while avoiding any semblance of real work by applying himself wholeheartedly to the principle of “constructive laziness”. The events and descriptions parallel Heinlein’s own Navy career. After the Naval Academy the protagonist becomes rich by taking advantage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers not to farm their land. Heinlein disdained government interference in business, especially in the form of handouts, and the level of taxation necessary to sustain such programs.