Korean Combat

This volume contains 20 autobiographies of men who fought in the Korean War. Their stories help listeners to understand what draftees, volunteers, and professional military men experienced in combat in Korea. They often tell information not available in US military reports and government-authorized histories and sometimes contradict official reports.

This volume contains 17 autobiographies of Korean War combat veterans, as well as a report about war prisoners' experiences told by a US Army doctor who spent three years as a POW. It also contains reports about how the US divided Korea after World War II and Theodore Roosevelt’s secret diplomacy, in 1905, which led to World War II in the Pacific, the Korean War, and continuing turmoil in the Pacific.

This volume of Combat Veterans’ Stories of the Vietnam War contains 15 autobiographical stories.
The first begins in late October 1967, and is told by a Marine rifleman who fought in battles at Mike’s Hill, Foxtrot Ridge, and numerous others. The final story in this volume is told by an Army cavalry officer who led a platoon of armored personnel carriers with such ability and daring that he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, three Silver Stars, four Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts.

The Yalu River Boys is the true story of the forgotten men from the forgotten war. Follow a B-29 bomber crew as it battles Russian MiG-15 fighters in the heart of MiG Alley during the Korean War. Learn the heartbreaking truth of the communist prison camp gulags, the cruelty of the North Korean enemy, and the propaganda attacks from friend and foe. Marvin King joined the US Air Force in peacetime but soon found himself in the midst of jet-age aerial combat, captured and taken into China, and later subjected to the abject horror of a place in North Korea known only as The Caves.

In the decades since the "forgotten war" in Korea, conventional wisdom has held that the Eighth Army consisted largely of poorly trained, undisciplined troops who fled in terror from the onslaught of the Communist forces. Now, military historian Thomas E. Hanson argues that the generalizations historians and fellow soldiers have used regarding these troops do little justice to the tens of thousands of soldiers who worked to make themselves and their army ready for war.

The Korean War, which began in 1950 and ended in 1953, is not considered one of the major wars of the 20th century. However, in reality, it was profoundly impactful on global history. As an early crisis of the Cold War, it set important precedents for how conflicts would be handled during this era. It has also shaped Korea’s history for more than half a century.

The narrative of the Korean War in the West, and particularly in the United States, tells the tale of a conflict between two global superpowers and competing ideologies in a far-flung corner of the globe. The reality is that the wheels of motion that drove the country to war in 1950 began turning long before American boots set foot on Korean soil. The heart of the conflict was a civil war between a population arbitrarily divided by colonization and the global geopolitics at the end of the Second World War.

Some warriors are drawn to the thrill of combat and find it the defining moment of their lives. Others fall victim to fear, exhaustion, impaired reasoning, and despair. This was certainly true for twentieth-century American ground troops. Whether embracing or being demoralized by war, these men risked their lives for causes larger than themselves with no promise of safe return.