Cold Ground's Been My Bed: A Korean War Memoir (Paperback)

by Daniel Wolfe (Author) "After twelve years of gestation, the senior class of February 1948 was declared full term on the spacious stage of the James Monroe High School..." (more)
Key Phrases: confidence course, infiltration course, cadre man, Cold Ground's Been My Bed, Daniel Wolfe, Lieutenant Meese (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Dan Wolfe was a Bronx, New York, teenager whose passions were baseball, fooling around in school, and hanging out at the candy store in the 1940s. Three years out of high school, he was drafted and sent to Korea. Cold Ground’s Been My Bed is his no-holds-barred memoir of the experience, from his physical to deployment into a frontline platoon.

Dan tells the story with unflinching honesty and humor amid the tragedies that befell his company.

• Feeling inadequate about handling the Browning Automatic Rifle in basic training, he expressed his doubts to a cadre man, who assured him, “You don’t have to worry about it, kid. It’s given to the biggest men in the squad.” The day he arrived on the front line, Dan, five-foot-seven and 133 pounds, was assigned the twenty-pound BAR.
• When his platoon was ambushed, Dan crawled over fire-swept terrain to retrieve the body of his sergeant. Decades later he learned that he’d been cited for the Silver Star, but the Jeep carrying the papers was blown up by mortar rounds.
• When a GI was killed by negligent “friendly fire,” the victim’s buddy carried out a revenge murder.

In recounting his story, Dan never pretends to be more than he was, a young man being shocked and shaped by the reality of war.

About the Author

Daniel Wolfe upon discharge from the service, with the aid of the GI Bill attended the City College of New York, where he received his Bachelor's Degree. He taught biology for 35 years at Jane Addams HS in the Bronx while living with his family in Chestnut Ridge, NY. After a forty year hiatus, he reconnected with his army buddies and then began recording his and their memories of the Korean War. Wolfe keeps track of the survivors of his Company L and publishes a newsletter full of reminiscences, corny GI humor, and reports of knee replacements, by-pass surgeries, prostate problems and visits to VA hospitals.

His stories have been read on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and published in "The Urban Hiker," a literary magazine in Durham, North Carolina. He recently completed Seabury Place:A Bronx Memoir about his happy childhood and coming of age in the Great Depression.

Product Details

• Paperback: 330 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse, Inc. (March 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0595341357
• ISBN-13: 978-0595341351
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,528,241 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You Had to Have Been There, April 20, 2005

By	R. Potter - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

But if you missed the Korean conflict (The Forgotten War), Dan Wolfe will take you back as a young man from the Bronx suddenly thrust into battle. In Wolfe's hands the obligatory basic training sequence is fresh and often hilarious. Battle descriptions are those of a foot-soldier, up front and personal.
Readers will welcome the dozens of photographs of Wolfe's buddies from his unit, both during and after the war. This is a very personal book, not the big picture. As such it has a compeling vitality, and the most real sense of "you are there" .

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ordinary Men Extraordinary Times, August 13, 2005

By	Marilyn Fast (Raleigh, NC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The Korean War memoir is only a backdrop for this story of a young Jewish man, raised in an apartment in the Bronx, who is thrust into a larger world. Wolfe, with keen perception and humorous insights, shows us a twenty-two-year old who thought people from Brooklyn and Long Island had foreign accents and then finds himself in the company of an American Indian from Oklahoma and Southerners with incomprehensible drawls. He describes the "hole in the ground called a bunker" on the MLR (front line), the place he will call home for weeks on end. He shows us the hopes and fears of all young men, the letter-writing to girls back home, the fooling around.

Wolfe's endless questions help us to see the young men in the war. "Will I be out there, part of that noise?" "Could I handle this?" "What the hell kind of operation is this?" "Where's Wayne?" He portrays scenes where he felt the military had made poor decisions. For example, when the starving South Koreans raided the garbage dump for food, the Army ordered the dump to be soaked with gasoline and set on fire subsequently, instead of providing the food scraps for the Koreans. And he leaves us with haunting doubts on the validity of wars where "I've noticed nearly all the dead were hardly more than boys."

This is not a somber, heart-wrenching read. You will chuckle frequently. And at the end, you will see the "boys" of Wolfe's company fifty years later, ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, most of whom performed nobly and with compassion. They were sent to do a job. They did it as best they could and then went home to go on with their lives. You will laugh and cry with them. Admire them for their honestly and courage. And you will follow Wolfe on his quest to find out what happened to Wayne.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book, May 17, 2006

By	Murray - See all my reviews

This is a gripping memoir of a draftee as he is plucked from the Bronx, NY, goes through basic training and is then shipped toward the raging war in Korea. This is a book that would appeal to many readers, as Wolfe is a great storyteller who does an excellent job in conveying the tragedy and humor of life in an infantry platoon. The many questions and thoughts that go through the mind of a young man caught up in a senseless war halfway across the world are revealed in this book.