Muffled Shots: A Year on the Dmz
Editorial Reviews
From Independent Publisher
This brief work is noteworthy for its setting. The U.S. military presence in Korea has been virtually ignored by historians and novelists alike in the 30 years since the end of the Korean War. Most images of that country are derived from the familiar television series M. A. S. H. Roskey deserves credit for challenging Alan Alda, successfully establishing the mood of a border where the fighting never really stopped, and where U.S. troops remain a valued proof of commitment to an ally. The book is typical of its genre: a blend of personal experience, hearsay, hindsight, and wish-fulfillment in a conventional fictional format. The narrator/protagonist serves in an intelligence detachment whose real mission is countering North Korean infiltrators. The time is the mid- 1960s, and the situations and dialogue invite comparison to Robin Moore's The Green Berets. Both works feature young Americans on the outpost lines of a kind of war none of them quite understand. The everyday risks generate the same spectrum of tension. The vicious little fire-fights have the same anonymity. And a man killed on the nameless ridges is just as dead as if he had fallen at Khe Sanh, in Beirut, or anywhere else the television cameras and news reporters bother to notice. In This Kind of War, T.R. Fehrenbach used Korea to pose the question whether the American tradition of citizen soldiering could provide the legionaries necessary to cope with the requirements of policy wars. Muffled Shots implies that this is possible, but at a high human cost. If Charlie Daniels sings for the Vietnam veterans "still in Saigon," Roskey has written for those still on the DMZ.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Muffled Shots: A Year on the Dmz,William Roskey,Authors Choice Press,0595149510,Fiction,History - Military / War,Military - Vietnam War,War & Military
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