The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea [Hardcover]

This is a splendid little book about what one American statesman characterized, quite accurately, as "a sour little war." The reasons are clear. With the possible exception of the Falkland Islands War, no other conflict in the second half of the 20thcentury was fought over ground as consistently inhospitable as the three-year struggle in barren, frigid Korea. Author James Brady, who served as a Marine lieutenant there, describes the essence of the problem early in the book: "Hard enough fighting a war; in Korea, the cold could kill you." And he invokes the horrors of combat in the First World War and the Civil War when he makes this point: "In some ways, it wasn't a modern war at all, more like Flanders or the Somme or even the Wilderness campaign." Brady is a wonderful writer and creates marvelous word pictures of the war. Many operations took place after dark, and he writes: "The grenade, the knife, the shotgun, even the shovel and the axe were the weapons of night patrols." Brady also offers telling observations about matters important and trivial, including fearing the night as shells roared out "very low and directly overhead," feeling chagrined when he could not answer a colonel's question about the location of two machine guns which he commanded, using a wooden ammunition box as a toilet, urinating on his rifle to thaw it for firing, not changing underwear for 46 days while "on the line, living in holes," and subsisting for weeks at a time on c-rations. Nevertheless, according to Brady: "There was a purity about life on the line, a crude priesthood of combat." And he also remarks: "When you weren't fighting, the war was pretty good." Readers may be offended by some of Brady's recollection, including the incessant references to Koreans as "gooks" (except when he visits a village and addresses the inhabitants as "our Korean brothers"): The Korean bearers who deliver supplies to the line are known by everyone as the "gook train," and the universal eating utensil manufactured from a shell casing is known as a "gook spoon." Chinese soldiers always are "chinks." However, I found Brady's honesty engaging, even when it was politically incorrect. Brady's memoir is remarkably free of rancor, and, in fact, he appears to have respected his adversaries. Brady reports that some of the one million Chinese engaged in the war had been fighting continuously since the mid-1930s, first against the Japanese, then amongst themselves in the civil war which preceded the victory of Mao Zedong's Communists, and finally against the Republic of Korea, the United States, and their Allies. Nevertheless, Brady saves his highest accolades for his own First Marine Division, which he characterizes, without false modesty, as being "as powerful an infantry division as there had ever been in combat anywhere." Brady saves some of his most wry observations for superior officers, but he had unbridled admiration for his company commander Captain John Chafee, a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, who later was elected governor of Rhode Island and then had a distinguished career in the U.S. Senate. This book is not about grand strategy, national policy, or the geopolitics of the early Cold War. It provides a very narrow view of the Korean War. But, taken on its own terms, as the account of one Marine officer's experience, it is excellent.

Brady's account of the rapid education a naïve and untried young officer has to learn and accomplish to stay alive and in command as the fight erupts, evolves, and subsides. His description of the day-to-day experience of war in Korea is quite evocative, and he succeeds in spinning a very readable and entertaining introduction to the realities of life as a foot soldier. Defense of fixed-line trenches in a deadly barrage of enemy artillery is absolutely terrifying to the young marines, as are the long still nights, filled with a deceptive calm. The quick-changing extremes in Korean weather often provided additional challenges to the young marines, and he explains how the combination of sustained periods of cold with an eerie pregnant silence sometimes lulled the troopers into sometimes-deadly states of inattention. If war can be described as long periods of boredom punctuated by sudden explosions of murder and mayhem, then this book is a deadly accurate portrayal of the experience of war.

Too many of our contemporary citizens lack an understanding of the extreme nature of the experience of combat, and that periods of actual combat are usually short and staccato experiences that come with absolute surprise and subside just as suddenly. As important in understanding the enormity of the experience of war are the other elements; loneliness, boredom, and exposure to the elements. Under the most difficult of circumstances, ordinary human beings are called upon to make the most solemn and extreme sacrifices, and this book details the terrifying context in which all this unfolded in Korea better than anything else I have read on the subject. I heartily recommend this book, and hope it will be widely read.