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Reviews
"Honoring Those Who Paid the Price"
Forgotten Voices from the Korean War
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By Randy K. Mills
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(Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2002. Pp. xx, 276. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
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| Randy Mills draws upon soldiers' letters and recent personal interviews with veterans, relatives, and friends to recover the voices of Indiana veterans of the Korean conflict. He contextualizes their struggle in the broader scope of the war's arc from shocking mobilization to fading victory to disillusioning stalemate. |
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Mills adroitly selects ordinary citizens' voices, devoting lengthy sections of the narrative to their detailed recollections and allowing veterans and their families to illuminate several key aspects of recruitment and fighting conditions. We learn of the many factors that motivated soldiers to enlist: poverty, desire to emulate older brothers' World War II service, machismo, and adventure. We learn, too, of how soldiers' ordinary struggles became extraordinary challenges in difficult terrain and climate, as Marine Corps reservist David Graham suggests in his description of carrying a frozen sleeping bag. Others suffered pain of a different sort, as we see from the racial slurs in the letters some soldiers sent home and in the recollections of African American soldiers— juxtaposed with Army private Stanley Nelson's reflection that "Korean civilians were the greatest casualties of the war" (p. 101). Mills includes voices from the home front, including a letter to the Indianapolis Star that illustrates the rampant paranoia induced by confrontation with Communism. |
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