However, the author writes from this perspective because he was a combat leader at platoon, company, and battalion levels during this war. Partly drawn from official records, operations journals, and histories, Fehrenbach uses his experience and many personal interviews to describe the feelings, pressures, and fears of the soldiers, which enable the reader to understand the actions and frustrations of those who fought. The author sees several lessons learned from this war. Fehrenbach states that disasters occur every time an army is mentally and physically unprepared to fight. Soldiers live and die by their training, and units must be trained for contingency, short-notice operations with proper equipment.
Gradual deployment is a prescription for catastrophe.
Furthermore, policy-makers must account for the support of the American public in their political and military planning. Fehrenbach argues that Americans need a strong unifying emotion to motivate themselves to go to war. Written before the Vietnam War, the book foretells some of the problems of that war with eerie accuracy. Fifty years later, this narrative still has strong applications for us today as it chronicles the story of military and political unpreparedness that led to a great loss of American lives in Korea. Each quarter, one of the books from the Chief of Staff of the Air Force's Reading List will be spot-lighted as the book of the quarter.