Battle Songs: A Story of the Korean War in Four Movements

9780595414239

0595414230

Sing. Sing Battle Songs! So begins the story of four young men drafted to fight in Korea in the early 1950s, taking with them a legacy of conflict and violence that prevails to this day. Inducted from the mining and farming communities in rural Pennsylvania, each must confront the absurdity of battle within the framework of his own identity in an effort to understand a war that remains unresolved more than half a century later. Told from our different perspectives, this novel contrasts the horrors of the battlefield with accounts of mid-twentieth-century life in an overlooked part of America-a world far different on the surface from the one young people know in today's strife-torn opening years of the twenty-first century. At the same time, it evokes lingering questions about how combat on distant shores can interface with individual lives at home.