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Rating: 
Summary: An eclectic, if also disjointed, battlefield survey
Review: The author has compiled 34 separate firsthand accounts of combat from the port of Pusan to the hours before the Armistice. Largely unedited, the tales make interesting reading. I believe that such renditions from Soldiers on the scene make war most real, for each story, like each Soldier, is unto itself. The political books I review are great to read for the diplomatic and political intrigue, but the raw reports from the trenches have an honesty which is heartrending. This book is similar to Donald Knox's texts since it consists of a series of short stories. But Knox's books are more effective because the stories are interwoven and tie the book together as a coherent whole. Tomedi's book and a few others like it are more disjointed, if still useful reading.
Tomedi adds to the Korean War literature significantly with Bill Chambers' saga as a graves registration person. Few authors talk or discuss the role of these final scavengers of the battlefield, assigned the grim task of assembling and identifying human remains. Harry Summers--who has a bevy of books about the war himself-- states that Ridgways' miracle was getting the US army off the roads [tankbound, he said] and up onto the hills and ridges where the enemy were. Ridgway concentrated on killing the enemy--not taking territory. Louis Millet is modest enough to admit that his famous bayonet charge was successful primarily because the Chinese decided to throw grenades rather then use their rifles. Sherman Pratt's views from Heartbreak Ridge, and a stern lecture from a French Legionnaire about the UN intervention, is a rare glimpse of how moral considerations reach the battlefield itself. Three chapters highlight the air war-- ground support, strategic bombing, and combat fighters. Ben Scotts' experience as a black officer in a white army should be required reading for all Korean war buffs. [Despite the "patronizing expectation of failure.... there was no better institution in American life, no better one anywhere, than the army for the black man in the forties and fifties." ] So should Blaine Freidlander's experience with the ROKs, who many GIs held in contempt for bugging out or cowardice. ROKs were effective and disciplined fighters, once they were trained, as Jim Houlton makes clear in the a later chapter describing how they proved themself at White Horse mountain. Friedlander was, however, put off by the cruelty and severity of the ROKs; those were accepted characteristics of Korean society, apparently. [reviewers comment: they still are. Korea remains a very heavyhanded, authoritarian society.] It staggers the imagination that Stanley Weintraub, a college professor in charge of POW processing, was forced to use those very same POWs as translators. In fact the whole POW/internment/Koje uprising issue is such an example of post WWII cold-war naivete about the intentions, tactics, and style of communists that I am not surprised that McCarthy hysteria about spies reached the intensity that it did. Overall, a good book. Some unique stories and insights from folks on the ground in Korea.
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