Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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" .

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.

Danel Wolfe tells the poignant story of a young man leaving the warmth of his familly in the Bronx to the foxholes of Korea in wartime. Wonderful read!

This book is great. I was a bit afraid to read it because I hate war and violence but it is so much more than that. It gives you a real insight on what is going on in the mind of a young soldier. The gravity of the book's subject is offset by the author's hilarious sense of humor. The range of emotions that it evokes is amazing and yet it's done with great subtlety.I just wanted to read more and more.