The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea
by Charles Robert Jenkins
from University of California Press
In January of 1965, twenty-four-year-old U.S. Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins abandoned his post in South Korea, walked across the DMZ, and surrendered to communist North Korean soldiers standing sentry along the world's most heavily militarized border. He believed his action would get him back to the States and a short jail sentence. Instead he found himself in another sort of prison, where for forty years he suffered under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes the world has known. This fast-paced, harrowing tale, told plainly and simply by Jenkins (with journalist Jim Frederick), takes the reader behind the North Korean curtain and reveals the inner workings of its isolated society while offering a powerful testament to the human spirit.
About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior
by Colonel David H. Hackworth
from Touchstone
Operation Broken Reed: Truman's Secret North Korean Spy Mission That Averted World War III
by Arthur L. Boyd
from Da Capo Press
The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea
by James Brady
from St. Martin's Griffin
In 1947, seeking to avoid the draft, nineteen-year-old Jim Brady volunteered for a Marine Corps program that made him a lieutenant in the reserves on the day he graduated college. He didn't plan to find himself in command of a rifle platoon three years later facing a real enemy, but that is exactly what happened after the Chinese turned a so-called police action into a war.
The Coldest War vividly describes Brady's rapid education in the realities of war and the pressures of command. Opportunities for bold offensives sink in the miasma of trench warfare; death comes in fits and starts as too-accurate artillery on both sides seeks out men in their bunkers; constant alertness is crucial for survival, while brutal cold and a seductive silence conspire to lull soldiers into an often fatal stupor.
The Korean War affected the lives of all Americans, yet is little known beyond the antics of "M*A*S*H." Here is the inside story that deserves to be told, and James Brady is a powerful witness to a vital chapter of our history.
Toward the Flame: A Memoir of World War I
by Hervey Allen
from University of Nebraska Press
Scrappy: Memoir of a U.S. Fighter Pilot in Korea and Vietnam
by Howard C Johnson
from McFarland
From World War II to high above the Earth to Vietnam, this memoir tells the story of fighter pilot Howard C. "Scrappy" Johnson. Beginning with his early years in Knoxville, Tennessee, the book follows Johnson through his career at the University of Louisville and his enlistment as an Air Force cadet at the onset of World War II. After World War II, Johnson served a tour of duty in the skies over Korea and in 1958 broke the world's altitude record by over 14,000 feet, soaring at 91,249 feet in his F-104A Starfighter. For this remarkable feat he was awarded the Collier Trophy, aviation's highest honor. In Vietnam, he was director of operations for the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing and was instrumental in founding the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots, a group dedicated to the remembrance of fallen and captured airmen. Written with panache, this work records the bigger-than-life adventures of one of America's finest.
White Tigers: My Secret War in North Korea (Memories of War)
by Ben S. Malcom
from Potomac Books Inc.
Operating from a clandestine camp on an island off western North Korea, Army Lt. Ben Malcom coordinated the intelligence activities of eleven partisan battalions, including the famous White Tigers. With Malcom’s experiences as its focus, White Tigers examines all aspects of guerrilla activities in Korea. This exciting memoir makes an important contribution to the history of special operations.
Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir
by Joseph R. Owen
from Ballantine Books
"A MUST READ . . . This book [is] one of the best on that war in Korea. . . . A wonderful account of common, decent men in desperate action."
--Leatherneck
During the early, uncertain days of the Korean War, World War II veteran and company lieutenant Joe Owen saw firsthand how the hastily assembled mix of some two hundred regulars and raw reservists hardened into a superb Marine rifle company known as Baker-One-Seven.
As comrades fell wounded and dead around them on the frozen slopes above Korea's infamous Chosin Reservoir, Baker-One-Seven's Marines triumphed against the relentless human-wave assaults of Chinese regulars and took part  in the breakout that destroyed six to eight divisions of Chinese regulars. COLDER THAN HELL paints a vivid, frightening portrait of one of the most horrific infantry battles ever waged.
"Thoroughly gripping . . . The Chosin action is justly called epical; Lieutenant Owen tells the tale of the men who made it so."
--Booklist
Gunner's Glory: Untold Stories of Marine Machine Gunners
by Johnnie Clark
from Presidio Press
They were warriors, trained to fight,
dedicated to their country,
and determined to win.
At Guadalcanal, the Marine Corps’ machine gunners took everything the Japanese could throw at them in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II; their position was so hopeless that at one point they were given the go-ahead to surrender. Near the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, as the mercury dropped to twenty below, the 1st Marine Division found itself surrounded and cut off by the enemy. The outlook seemed so bleak that many in Washington had privately written off the men.
But surrender is not part of a Marine’s vocabulary. Gunner’s Glory contains true stories of these and other tough battles in the Pacific, in Korea, and in Vietnam, recounted by the machine gunners who fought them. Bloody, wounded, sometimes barely alive, they stayed with their guns, delivering a stream of firepower that often turned defeat into victory–and always made them the enemy’s first target.
MASH: An Army Surgeon in Korea
by Otto F. Apel
from University Press of Kentucky
When North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, Otto Apel was a surgical resident living in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife and three young children. A year later he was chief surgeon of the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital constantly near the front lines in Korea.
Immediately upon arriving in camp, Apel performed 80 hours of surgery. His feet swelled so badly that he had to cut his boots off, and he saw more surgical cases in those three and a half days than he would have in a year back in Cleveland.
In addition to his own story, Apel answers the questions anyone interested in a MASH unit would ask: What were the operating conditions like? What was a typical work load? What level of care did patients get? How did the doctors, nurses, and enlisted personnel get along? And, perhaps most obviously, how realistic was the TV series?
Along the way, he tells the history of the MASH and the appalling lack of training received by the newly drafted doctors staffing those units. He also reveals many significant medical innovations in emergency medical care, from advances in arterial repair to the use of blood plasma in the treatment of hemorrhagic shock.
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