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Purple Hearts - Battle Scars: Memories from the Forgotten War | 
 enlarge | Author: John Schneider
Creator: Gen. Bernard E, Trainor Ret
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing
Category: Book
Buy New: $18.99
New (3) from $18.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 477429
Media: Paperback
Pages: 310
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.8
ISBN: 141968972X
Dewey Decimal Number: 951
EAN: 9781419689727
ASIN: 141968972X
Publication Date: July 23, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
"Purple Hearts-Battle Scars" is a vivid and sensitive account of combat in the Korean War as seen through the eyes of a nineteen-year old Marine sergeant. This is no macho book; with nine months of combat and two Purple Hearts, the author has no need to prove his credentials or his manhood. Rather, he quietly and movingly shares his experience of war, of the loss and the courage, of the comradship and the pain, and of the grim reality that in modern warfare survival is mosly a matter of luck--and he shows us what it is like when the luck runs out and the hot shell fragment tears into flesh. We learn the weapons and the tactics, the terror of night battles and we see the hills devoid of vegetation as the constant shelling reduces the land to powder. A Foreword and an Afterword by Marine Lt. General Bernard E. Trainor (Ret.) provide this book a context that gives the reader both an overview and a concluding point of rest.
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| Customer Reviews:
A good story August 27, 2008
This is an excellent book about the experience of being in combat. While it is a young Marine's first-person account of the fighting in Korea during the "outpost war" of 1952, the experiences are universal. "Each war is different; all wars are the same" is a truth that echoes in this book, for hardship, stress, comradeship and devotion to mission are the same for all men who fight.
This is a work that exists on several levels. It begins as a ship leaves San Diego, and ends as one returns to San Francisco--eveything between is in another world. It is an initiation journey; the writer leaves a boy, and returns a man, having undergone the rites of passage in the odeals of combat into the warrior's world, the world of killing and death during a pointless, endless war while the peace talks drag on.
In narrating his story the author uses few adjectives or adverbs; he doesn't tell the reader how he should feel, but shows him a scene leaving the reader free to close the unspoken gap and respond with his own feelings. In some ways this is a very gentle book, speaking quietly of courage and hardship and the awful integrity that goes with being a Marine.
This will be an invaluable book for future historians, as the author covers in detail the weapons, rations, conditions, and equipment of the time, but he also examines the assumptions, beliefs, and mores of the period. This is a good story, well told after the passage of fifty-five years.
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