Purple Hearts - Battle Scars: Memories from the Forgotten War

"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.