The Scariest Place in the World A Marine Returns to North Korea

by Brady, James

• ISBN13: 9780312332426
• ISBN10: 0312332424
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-04-01
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books

Summary

Half a century after he fought there as a young lieutenant of Marines, James Brady returns to the brooding Korean ridgelines and mountains to sound Taps for a generation. It's been 15 years since Brady first wrote of Korea in The Coldest War, drawing raves from Walter Cronkite andThe New York Times, which called it "a superb personal memoir of the way it was." In the spring of 2003 Brady and Pulitzer-winning combat photographer Eddie Adams, a couple of old Marines, "gentlemen rankers off on a spree," flew in Black Hawk choppers and trekked the Demilitarized Zone where it meanders into North Korea, interviewing four-star generals and bunking in with tough U.S. Recon troops, in Brady's words, "raw meat on the point of a sharpened stick." The two Marine veterans bond with this handful of youthful GIs confronting the loopy and nuclear saber-rattling North, in a contemporary Korea which just might become the war we have to fight next. Brady recalls that first time on bloody Hill 749, the men who died there, what happened to the Marines who lived to make it home, and experiences yet again the emotional pull of a lifelong love affair with the Corps in which they all served. With consummate skill James Brady summons up the past and illuminates the present, be it the Korea of "the forgotten war", the Yanks who fought there long ago or today's soldiers standing wary sentinel over "the scariest place in the world". The result is uplifting, inspiring, often heart-breaking, and this new Brady memoir proves as powerful as his first.

Author Biography

James Brady commanded a Marine rifle platoon during the Korean War and was awarded the Bronze Star for valor. He writes weekly for Parade Magazine and for Advertising Age. He lives in Manhattan and in East Hampton, New York.

Table of Contents

Praise for James Brady:

The Coldest War:
"His story reads like a novel, but it is war reporting at its best--a graphic depiction, in all its horrors, of the war we've almost forgotten."
--Walter Cronkite
"Mr. Brady has written a superb personal memoir of the way it was. What distinguishes Mr. Brady's book is its clarity and modesty; there is no heroic flag-waving here."
--The New York Times
"A marvelous memoir. A sensitive and superbly written narrative that eventually explodes off the pages like a grenade in the gut...taut, tight, and telling."
--Dan Rather

The Marine:
"In The Marine, James Brady again gives us a novel in which history is a leading character, sharing the stage in this case with a man as surely born to be a gallant warrior as any knight in Sixth century Camelot."
--Kurt Vonnegut


The Marines of Autumn:
“Mr. Brady knows war, the smell and the feel of it.”
—The New York Times
“Brady has stormed publishing high ground to become, arguably, our foremost novelist currently writing on the subject of Marines at war.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The Marines of Autumn is a masterpiece that recalls the era with awesome authenticity. The novel’s outcome is one of thunderous dramatic beauty and power.”
—The Associated Press