To predict any outcome where war is concerned is foolhardy and Alfred Wellnitz makes that point very clear in “For the Cause: The Cold War Gets Hot in Korea and Why Young Men Went to War.” When Pete Houser and Chris Engleson, schoolmates from a one room school house in South Dakota, left their family farms to join the Marines, they were looking for an adventure and something new in their lives. The adventure begins as they ship out to San Diego where they endure basic training together, but their lives take different paths thereafter as the Korean war breaks out. Chris is shipped out to Korea and is soon engaged in the worst of the fighting while Pete draws duty as a perimeter guard for Sangley Point Naval Air Station in the Philippines. Their lives become very different and they look toward what they will do when they are finally discharged. What twists of fate will be dealt to each of them as the unpredictability of the advance of communism is being held back by farm boys who love freedom, but are only just beginning to get a feel for what their futures will hold?
“For the Cause: The Cold War Gets Hot in Korea and Why Young Men Went to War” by Alfred Wellnitz brings the Korean War as well as the life of a Marine PFC to life in a way that will keep the reader fully engaged from beginning to end. Those things which one expects to see in war and duty are present, but there is also a profound look into the feelings and emotions of two farm boys learning to cope with that which fate has dealt them in the very practical and workman like thinking of someone from America’s mid-west. Real, engaging and enlightening; “For the Cause” is a very well written and personal chronicle of what it was like to be a marine in the 1950s, but it is more, it is a look into the ironic twists of fate and the depth of character necessary to survive them.
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