Vietnam
Veterans of America
Books
in Review
Unremembered
Victory by Dennis H. Klein
Posted
on October 22, 2019
Unremembered
Victory (Truth in the Hills Press, 176 pp. $8,
paper; $2.99, Kindle) is a short historical
novel by Dennis H. Klein. It deals with American
military concerns and actions along the DMZ
between North Korea and South Korea in 1968.
Klein says all the stories in the book are true,
but he uses “poetic license” in
telling them.
The focus
of the story is on what’s been called the
1968 “DMZ War” or sometimes the
“Second Korean War.” Klein says all
the characters are based on people he served
with or met during his twenty-one months in
Korea.
Four
thousand American troops found themselves
stationed near the DMZ a fifteen years after the
Korean War ended in a stalemate. These men were
considered neither the best nor the worst of
what America had to offer. It was commonly
believed that the best troops at the time were
serving in Vietnam. But so, it was believed,
were our worst troops because of Secretary of
Defense McNamara’s lowering of the mental
standards to fill out numbers for the war in
Vietnam.
Plus, the
West Point graduates serving as officers in
Korea were rumored to have graduated in the
bottom third of their class. As if that
wasn’t enough, it seemed that the equipment
sent to Korea was all “antiquated
junk” because the good stuff was going to
Vietnam.
Assuming
this is basically true, that left a Second
Infantry Division with average troops and
questionable equipment and a second-rate officer
corps to face the North Korean Army, the fourth
largest in the world, which was hell bent on
invading South Korea.
With North
Korea’s seizure of the U.S.S. Pueblo in
January 1968, Americans along the DMZ went from
their usual “state of high lollygag,”
as Klein puts it, to preparing for a war that
“could start anytime. Clerks, mechanics,
medics and cooks were now infantry
soldiers.” There were firefights up and
down the line and the extremely lethal North
Korean commandos were known to sometimes cross
surreptitiously into the South.
Students in
South Korea began marching in protest—not
against the possibility of war with the North,
though. They were in favor of a war in order to
unite North and South Korea.
Washington
did not want to fight another war while engaged
in Vietnam so the Army’s job was to control
things so they didn’t develop into a big
news story. Yet there also was talk of the
possible use of nuclear weapons. While this
didn’t become a major war, it was certainly
war enough for the American troops on the
ground.
“Once
you are north of the fence long enough, you are
out on the line in your head all the rest of
your days,” was a commonly expressed
thought.
A phrase
heard in writers’ circles is if you
can’t find the book you want to read, then
write it. That’s what Klein has done,
maintaining that the Vietnam War “should
not be the only story told of our generation.
Since DMZ the troops were all ordinary, swap in
any 4000 Vietnam soldiers for those who were
there and the outcome would have been exactly
the same."
This is an
interesting look at a vital story in danger of
being lost in the mists of
history.
–Bill
McCloud
