Word: stewart
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ridges of Korea, it became necessary to carry a stalemate to its logical inconclusion. In these tragic endurance contests, new kinds of American courage were bred, and that courage is celebrated in these two remarkable, non-fiction accounts by first-time authors. Give Us This Day, by Army Private Stewart, is the more powerful and moving. The Last Parallel, by Marine Sergeant Russ, is more cocky and exuberant; neither is for the reader who is queasy of mind or stomach...
Death March. Draftee Sidney Stewart was fresh from the States and stationed in Manila when the Japs started bombing the Philippines. So civilian-minded were his fellow soldiers that they mustered for departure to the front lines in oxfords rather than combat boots. So garrison-minded were their commanders that they issued orders while the bombs were falling that ties would not be worn and officers no longer saluted. Author Stewart catches the quickening tempo of panic. As he and a buddy ordered a drink at the posh Manila Hotel bar, they heard a girl with a brittle laugh telling...
...twelve days and nights of the Death March, 17,000 American and Filipino soldiers died. In the next 20 days, at Camp O'Donnell, 23,000 more died. Stewart's chronicle becomes a saga of almost miraculous survival in the face of starvation, brutality and the terrors of the mind. The high point of horror: the fetid hold of a Japanese transport where thirst-crazed prisoners, so tightly packed that they had to stand on their own dead, claw each other to death for a drink of blood...
What enabled Stewart to survive and keep his sanity? The loyalty of his closest buddies and a mute faith in God, best exemplified for Stewart in the selfless devotion of a priest, Father Bill Cummings, who first said, "There are no atheists in the foxholes," and who died while saying the Lord's Prayer over the dying, his very last words those of Stewart's title-"Give us this...
...Sidney Stewart endured war like a plague, Martin Russ resolved to pass it like a test. Russ, too, was 21 and fresh from St. Lawrence University when he joined the Marines, began keeping a day-to-day journal. What The Last Parallel lacks in art, it makes up in a jagged sense of immediacy. As the first Chinese rifle fire slapped against the sandbags of his bunker outpost, Russ and a fellow marine "hugged the ground and laughed like a couple of idiots. We laughed, I suppose, because there was ACTUALLY A MAN OUT THERE WHO WAS TRYING TO kill...