KOREA Shut-up and eat your C-rations: An Army Draftee’s Humorous Look Back

In 1956 I was a young army draftee disembarking from a troop ship in Inchon, South Korea. I had no idea where I would be sent, or what I would encounter. We were conditioned not to question, but to follow orders. To the army, you are just a number on a dog tag, a pawn to be moved at will on their military chessboard. There were two things the Army could not train out of us drafted pawns: our resourcefulness and our sense-of-humor. The ability to overcome the difficult, and laugh at the ridiculous carried us through whatever we encountered. “In this robust, rewarding memoir, author Daniel Fiddler recounts his experience as a young US army draftee, deployed, as part of the U.N. peacekeeping mission to Korea, stationed in the tense Demilitarized Zone, just after war with North Korea had ended. From stifling summer heat, frigid winter cold, to the ever present danger of land mines, un-exploded ordnance, spies and infiltrators, Fiddler paints a deft, vivid picture of what it was like when the war was over but enemy guns were still pointed across the DMZ. A great read for anyone who was there or who wants to know what it was like to have been there.” Ken Luber, author Match to the Heart,—Everybody’s Shadow