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55 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One Marine's View of the Early Cold War, May 27, 2000
James Brady, The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (1990, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Griffin edn., 2000) This is a splendid little book about what one American statesman characterized, quite accurately, as "a sour little war." The reasons are clear. With the possible exception of the Falkland Islands War, no other conflict in the second half of the 20thcentury was fought over ground as consistently inhospitable as the three-year struggle in barren, frigid Korea. Author James Brady, who served as a Marine lieutenant there, describes the essence of the problem early in the book: "Hard enough fighting a war; in Korea, the cold could kill you." And he invokes the horrors of combat in the First World War and the Civil War when he makes this point: "In some ways, it wasn't a modern war at all, more like Flanders or the Somme or even the Wilderness campaign." Brady is a wonderful writer and creates marvelous word pictures of the war. Many operations took place after dark, and he writes: "The grenade, the knife, the shotgun, even the shovel and the axe were the weapons of night patrols." Brady also offers telling observations about matters important and trivial, including fearing the night as shells roared out "very low and directly overhead," feeling chagrined when he could not answer a colonel's question about the location of two machine guns which he commanded, using a wooden ammunition box as a toilet, urinating on his rifle to thaw it for firing, not changing underwear for 46 days while "on the line, living in holes," and subsisting for weeks at a time on c-rations. Nevertheless, according to Brady: "There was a purity about life on the line, a crude priesthood of combat." And he also remarks: "When you weren't fighting, the war was pretty good." Readers may be offended by some of Brady's recollection, including the incessant references to Koreans as "gooks" (except when he visits a village and addresses the inhabitants as "our Korean brothers"): The Korean bearers who deliver supplies to the line are known by everyone as the "gook train," and the universal eating utensil manufactured from a shell casing is known as a "gook spoon." Chinese soldiers always are "chinks." However, I found Brady's honesty engaging, even when it was politically incorrect. Brady's memoir is remarkably free of rancor, and, in fact, he appears to have respected his adversaries. Brady reports that some of the one million Chinese engaged in the war had been fighting continuously since the mid-1930s, first against the Japanese, then amongst themselves in the civil war which preceded the victory of Mao Zedong's Communists, and finally against the Republic of Korea, the United States, and their Allies. Nevertheless, Brady saves his highest accolades for his own First Marine Division, which he characterizes, without false modesty, as being "as powerful an infantry division as there had ever been in combat anywhere." Brady saves some of his most wry observations for superior officers, but he had unbridled admiration for his company commander Captain John Chafee, a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, who later was elected governor of Rhode Island and then had a distinguished career in the U.S. Senate. This book is not about grand strategy, national policy, or the geopolitics of the early Cold War. It provides a very narrow view of the Korean War. But, taken on its own terms, as the account of one Marine officer's experience, it is excellent.
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35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Seductive & Absorbing Description Of Life On The Ground!, July 5, 2000
For anyone interested in learning more about the human experience of war, this is an unforgettable book. Expecting to avoid the futility of the draft by joining the Marine Corps right out of college, the author finds himself a young officer in Korea as a field officer commanding a rifle platoon. This memoir details what it is like to be a young, inexperienced, and frightened soldier on the ground when all Hell breaks loose. Like many of his generation, Brady discovers that time spent in trenches between episodes in combat are quite as burdensome as the firefights themselves, with too much time, too little comfort, and endless seas of ceaseless rain, snow, mud, and exposure to the elements for the uninitiated to wallow in. Brady's account of the rapid education a naïve and untried young officer has to learn and accomplish to stay alive and in command as the fight erupts, evolves, and subsides. His description of the day-to-day experience of war in Korea is quite evocative, and he succeeds in spinning a very readable and entertaining introduction to the realities of life as a foot soldier. Defense of fixed-line trenches in a deadly barrage of enemy artillery is absolutely terrifying to the young marines, as are the long still nights, filled with a deceptive calm. The quick-changing extremes in Korean weather often provided additional challenges to the young marines, and he explains how the combination of sustained periods of cold with an eerie pregnant silence sometimes lulled the troopers into sometimes-deadly states of inattention. If war can be described as long periods of boredom punctuated by sudden explosions of murder and mayhem, then this book is a deadly accurate portrayal of the experience of war. Too many of our contemporary citizens lack an understanding of the extreme nature of the experience of combat, and that periods of actual combat are usually short and staccato experiences that come with absolute surprise and subside just as suddenly. As important in understanding the enormity of the experience of war are the other elements; loneliness, boredom, and exposure to the elements. Under the most difficult of circumstances, ordinary human beings are called upon to make the most solemn and extreme sacrifices, and this book details the terrifying context in which all this unfolded in Korea better than anything else I have read on the subject. I heartily recommend this book, and hope it will be widely read.
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Personality of the Forgotten War, August 12, 2000
James Brady's "The Coldest War - A Memoir of Korea" is at once both a personal view and a writer's view. Brady spent a little less than one year as a Marine officer in Korea as a rifle platoon leader, company exec, intelligence officer and finally a company commander. We are fortunate to have a writer of his caliber tell us his innermost thoughts as he grew from a green 23-year-old Second Lieutenant into a very mature, and war-weary First Lieutenant (still 23 years old) leaving the war, all in the period of about ten months. By his own admission, he was not a hero, and equally by his own admission, he had no intention of becoming one. He merely wanted to be a competent officer, and live through the experience of a lifetime, making as few mistakes as possible on the way. He saw action, he saw death, he experienced the loss of friends and describes all of this in stark detail, with no frills. It is a description war as it is, not Hollywood's version, and one gets the sense that if others in combat could write the way Brady does, the stories would all be very similar, and our history of war would be much more complete. Brady does not mince words, and his descriptions divulge criticism of shortcomings of higher echelon decisions and higher ranking officers alike, not from spite or in a desire to get back at those he didn't get along with, but with a clear eye to failings of leadership and communication common in all military systems, especially during combat. Walter Cronkite says this book reads like a novel, but I disagree. There is no plot, no happy ending. It is a wonderfully descriptive and detailed book about the personality of the Korean War, a "police action" which is only now getting its due. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves history, and wants to learn more about Korea than can be learned watching all the episodes of "Mash" back-to-back.
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