Peter Tauber, whose book “The Sunshine Soldiers” became a popular, irreverent memoir of the Vietnam era, died March 12 in Park City, Utah. He was 56 and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Tauber was on a skiing vacation when he collapsed while waiting for a chair lift and was pronounced dead at the scene, his family said.
After a brief period as a newspaper reporter, he struck out on his own in 1970. He had a stint as a nightclub comedian and wrote sketches for NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”
Subject to the military draft and possible assignment to combat in Vietnam, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve as an alternative to jail or Canada, and wrote about it in “The Sunshine Soldiers” (1971), a journal of his eight weeks in basic combat training with the men of Charlie Company in Ft. Bliss, Texas.
Robert Sherrill, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it “a blend of `Lucky Jim’ and `Catch-22,’ and the quality of the writing is nearly up to both.”
He followed with a novel, “The Last Best Hope” (1978), with which he sought to encapsulate in fiction the political and social turbulence of the 1960s. It was a Book of the Month Club selection but did not equal the success of his debut.
Mr. Tauber was born in the Bronx and graduated from Hobart College in 1968.
He was a reporter for The Geneva Times in upstate New York and The New York Times, to which he later contributed magazine profiles of Muhammad Ali and Gary Hart, among others, in the 1980s.
