About This Book
The Marine is Colonel James ("Oliver") Cromwell, a warrior forged at Notre Dame and the Berlin of Hitler's Olympics, and honed by combat at Guadalcanal as one of Carlson's Marine Raiders. With the world at peace, the thirty-five-year old Cromwell is restlessly, if pleasantly, beached on garrison duty in California, aware of how much he misses the war, when he is ordered to fresh duty beyond the seas, as military attache to the American ambassador in a dull Asian backwater half a world away. There, at dawn on a June Sunday, Ollie gets his wish for action. Korea violently erupts and Colonel Cromwell is caught up in the early, panicked, rout. While South Koreans cut and run, the first GIs hurried into battle are brushed aside by advancing Red tanks and tough peasant infantry.
The Marine chronicles the war-hardened Cromwell's experience of the dramatic First Hundred Days of a brutal three-year Korean War, the chaos and cowardice of retreat, the last-ditch gallantry of the Pusan Perimeter, MacArthur's brilliant left hook sending Marines against the deadly seawall at Inchon, and the bloody assault to liberate Seoul and promote MacArthur's 1952 presidential ambitions. Ollie Cromwell's is the story of a "forgotten war" that never truly ended, but for a bitter truce along what a recent U.S. president called "the most dangerous border in the world."
