"THE KOREAN WAR: ""The Forgotten War"""

Stein (The Mexican Revolution: 1910-1920, p. 485), who served in the Marines not long after the Korean War, paints a detailed picture of that war and the reaction to it in the US. Unlike its popular predecessor, WW II, or its despised successor, Vietnam, the ""police action"" in Korea went almost unnoted by the American public, despite its enormous number of casualties and the ferocity of its battles. After General MacArthur's initial successes, such as the Inchon landing and the quick strike into North Korea, the war became a series of deadly battles for inches of territory -- a virtual stalemate. At that time an Oregon newspaper purposefully ran the same story about Korea two days running to prove how uninterested the public had become in war news; not one subscriber commented on the duplication. When one Chicago Marine returned from Korea, a neighbor commented that he hadn't seen him around for a while and asked if he'd been out of town. Today, Korea is a footnote in history, known more from the popular movie and TV series M*A*S*H than from the classroom, which is why Stein's well-written account is so necessary. Occasionally dry reportage is more than compensated for by the wealth of interesting information presented here.