About the Book

When the first wounded Marines arrived from Korea in the fall of 1950, Charles Hughes was a Navy hospital corpsman working on the wards at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. He was gripped by the stories those young men told. Too young for World War II and having missed that opportunity, Hughes now discovered in himself a strong desire to escape routine ward duties and travel to the country whose existence he had just recently learned about and find out what combat is really like. He and his friend Ollie Langston decided to volunteer for the Fleet Marine Force. Just days after they submitted their request they found themselves undergoing combat training at Camp Pendleton, the Marine base at Oceanside, California. Their desire to see what combat was like was more than satisfied in the months that followed.

Accordion War: Korea 1951 - Life and Death in a Marine Rifle Company is a detailed personal account of combat in the Korean War during its most violent "blitzkrieg" phase, the first third of the three-year war. While the descriptions of battles are up close and graphic, the conflict is also viewed from the perspective of the 21st century, from a keen awareness of the wars since —Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terror. Interwoven into the narrative is a meditation on life, death and war —on the question of why men spend so much treasure and blood fighting one another. The setting is the Republic of Korea, a beautiful country whose citizens fought for their freedom alongside United Nations forces, a people who have, since the war, emerged from the shadows of history to become cultural and technological leaders in the modern world. But Accordion War is first of all the story of a band of brothers and the battles they fought half way round the world in the rugged mountains of the country known as "the Land of the Morning Calm".

Fifty years before all America and the world were horror-struck by images of exploding planes and falling towers, September 11 was seared into the memories of the men in How Company, Third Battalion, Seventh Regiment, First Marine Division. There is a connection between those two days exactly a half-century apart. That connection can be found not far from Ground Zero in the village of Stewart Manor on Long Island inscribed on a memorial plaque dedicated to victims of 9/11 — and in this book.

About the Author

Charles Hughes spent four years in the U.S. Navy enlisting in 1948 at the age of seventeen. During the closing weeks of 1950 while the 1st Marine Division was surrounded and fighting their way out of the Chinese Communist trap at the frozen Chosin Reservoir, he and his friend Ollie Langston volunteered for the Fleet Marine Force to serve as hospital corpsmen in a Marine rifle company. He had missed World War II and wanted to find out what combat was like. Accordion War is the story of his experience.

Today Hughes is professor emeritus of English at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. He graduated with a BA in political science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1957 and for the next nine years worked in communication intelligence for the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and later the Air Force Security Service as a cryptanalyst (Russian), instructor of cryptanalysis, technical writer (cryptanalysis), technical editor, and finally as the Chief of the Editing and Publications Branch of the USAFSS School at Goodfellow AFB, San Angelo, Texas.

He left that position in 1966 to attend graduate school at Texas Tech University at Lubbock where he received an MA (1968) and a PhD (1971) in literature and linguistics after which he was hired by Henderson State where he taught up to and after his retirement in 1996, serving for five of those years as Chairman of the English and Foreign Languages Department.

Excerpts