THREE-WAR MARINE:
THE PACIFIC~ KOREA~VIETNAM
Colonel Francis Fox Parry USMC (Ret.)
Pacifica Press, 1987. F/NF.
A slight amount of inconspicuous edgewear along back edge of dust jacket.
First Edition. Original "$22.95" price still intact on dust jacket. Maps,
photographs, 273 pp. "Upon graduating from Annapolis in February 1941,
Francis Fox Parry and his classmates were sent directly to a makeshift
artillery course. Following the crudest training imaginable~they never
fired a gun~and without even attending The Basic School, at which Marine
officers usually receive their indoctrination, Parry found himself serving
with a hastily activiated Reserve artillery battalion. Little more than
a year out of the Naval Academy, and having learned all he could 'on the
job,' Parry was in the Pacific, an ill-prepared defender of an isolated
island bastion. In September 1942, Parry's artillery battalion was landed
at Guadalcanal and immediately sent into action. The early chapters of
THREE WAR MARINE are a chronicle of America's makeshift early-war effort.
That Fox Parry's generation rose so quickly to command artillery batteries
in combat after receiving such shoddy training addresses the underlying
issue of the level of preparedness at which America faced two of Parry's
three wars. By the end of the Okinawa Campaign, where he served as an artillery
battalion executive officer, Parry still did not feel that he knew very
much about the artilleryman's 'black art.' Parry's account of peacetime
duty after WWII is capped with his schooling at Fort Sill... Only then,
Parry admits, did he feel had a grasp of his profession. And none too soon,
for only months after graduation, Parry commanded an artillery battalion
in Korea ~ at Inchon, Seoul, and the Chosin Resevoir. Once again, Parry
faced the problems of taking a makeshift unit into combat at the outset
of a war for which his nation was unprepared. The story of Parry's battalion
in Korea is simply uplifting. Few Marine field-artillery units have performed
as competently and gallantly as Fox Parry's 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines,
at the Chosin Resevoir. In his later years in the Marine Corps, Parry helped
plan the aborted invasion of Cuba and was one of the key players in the
establishment of Gen Westmoreland's combat operations center in Saigon
in 1966. By then a seasoned, respected senior planner, Fox Parry was able
to recognize the symptoms of the many things that began going awry in Vietnam
at the very start of Westmoreland's tenure there. His thoughtful analysis
must be read by any serious student of the Vietnam War." Out of Print.
$25.00
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