Customer Reviews

The Right Kind of War

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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As a personal friend of Jim Rosevelt, in later life, the book caught my attention. The book is well written. I wish it could have included some of the first hand stories, he spoke of, during some of our family get togethers. The book portrays the heavy loss of life that occurred during those years to take the pacific islands. I would reread it, and plan to do just that.

This book is basicly a memoir written as fiction of service with the Marine Raiders and later with the 4th Marines. The accounts of jungle patrols are very intense and the discription of the battle of Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa is a pure nightmare. The book gives a good account of WWII Raider training and operations. At times, while describing camp life, the humour seems a bit strained.

If this book had come out twenty or thirty years earilar it would have been a classic, better than the exellent "Battle Cry." This a great Marine book, and an inside look at Raider life.

This will be one you will want to add to your book shelf as it is a book that really deserves a couple of good readings. The author tells a compelling tale of battle, the Marines and the war in the Pacific. It is accounts like this one that enable us to increase our understanding of those times, those of us who were not actually there. I highly recommend this one.

This is an interesting book, one of those curiosities that get written now and then. It's only about 10 years old: the writer was a veteran of World War II who had a successful career teaching English in Universities, and then teaching people to write after retiring. As a very young man, McCormick served in the U.S. Marine Corps, and fought on various Pacific islands, from Emirau to Guam to Okinawa. He fights with first a Tommy gun and later a BAR, serving in a platoon as a simple Marine and later becomes a squad leader. The book is written as if the author's telling you a bunch of stories, which are sorted in chronological order.

The author can write very well. The main character is a bit of a cipher, but the other characters in the story are especially well-done and amusing. Bill Werden, a Scout/Sniper, wanders in and out of the story, killing Japanese soldiers, fighting with other Marines, and on one occasion, rescuing an orphaned baby. The story isn't constructed as chapters; instead, it's almost as if the author were presenting them as short stories with similar characters and themes.

I enjoyed this book a great deal, and would recommend it. I don't know if Mr. McCormick has a second book in him, but I'm glad he wrote this first one.