In Paul H. D’Anna’s novel, a prank by a group of West Point cadets leads to a dangerous assignment.

The story begins one night in 1955. Two Army cadets sneak into a pasture outside Annapolis, Maryland, ahead of the annual Army-Navy football game and steal the Navy’s mascot, Bill the Goat. Three days later, they return the goat. No one ever figures out what happened.

Thirty-four years later, another team of pranksters tries another goat-napping, but they botch the job, failing to make off with the mascot. Frustrated, the cadets, led by swaggering, athletic Paul Toscano, aim for a bigger prize: the Commander in Chief’s Trophy (CIC), a 170-pound silver prize awarded each year to the winner of the Army/Navy/Air Force football series. Navy has the trophy; Army wants it back.

The trophy is stolen, but instead of a court martial, Toscano’s crew is recruited for a special mission: Operation Normandy, in the 1990-91 Gulf War. Can this band of rogues work together to achieve victory?

The book’s events are fictional, though, of course, the Gulf War was real. Operation Normandy seems to be a pseudonym for Task Force Normandy, an Army-Air Force mission in January 1991. The CIC is real as well, and it was pilfered from the Naval Academy by West Point students, though in 2005, not 1990.

Building a novel around such a prank has the makings of a comic masterpiece, but D’Anna’s execution is awkward and uneven. While the buildup to the CIC theft is funny and showcases the characters’ personalities, the Operation Normandy parts are straight action unleavened by humor.

The text also contains distracting errors. Several times, the author refers to Gulf War commander Norman Schwarzkopf as “Schwarzkoph.” He also writes “naval” as “navel,” “captain” as “capitan,” etc. The novel closes oddly, with “A Little Quiz To See If You Were Paying Attention” and other miscellanea.

Ultimately, this is a promising premise undone by uneven plotting and careless errors.

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