Outpost War (H)

Marine-focused works about the Korean War tend to concentrate on earlier events of that conflict: the Pusan Perimeter, Inchon or the Chosin Reservoir. Yet the war's second half cost almost as many marine casualties. A marine veteran of Korea, Ballenger highlights the First Marine Division's specific difficulties adjusting to static war on the DMZ. His reconstruction of the outpost war, whereby a main line of defense was screened by outpost positions, relies heavily on first-person accounts, mostly from retired officers who were platoon leaders during this period. It describes how the outposts, constructed as buffers, became troublesome centers of the action, but it does not contextualize the fighting. Ballenger stresses, for example, the youth of the enlisted marines, most of whom were 19 or younger, in contrast to the men of the war's earlier years. Did the age of the new replacements have any effect on marine operational performance or fighting power? This and similar questions are not raised. Despite such lapses, Ballenger has taken more pains to cross-check stories than is usual in this genre, and his narrators are painfully, almost brutally, honest in discussing their own behaviors, motives and emotions. The result is some of the best descriptive narratives of small-unit combat to come out of the Korean War, making the book a valuable contribution despite its shortcomings. Illus. not seen by PW. (July)