Day 177 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Monday was the day of making old soldiers happy. Well, not really old, just there and back. During World War II or the Korean War. OK, yes, probably old. My dad was in the army during the Korean War, though he did not go to Korea, and he is pretty darn old!

So, back to the topic of reading! On Monday, a veteran of the Korean War came in looking for a book called Raid at Inchon: Left Behind the Lines by Katherine Jones. Borders had sent him over to us at Babbitt's because they didn't have it and noticed that it was offered used online. We looked on the shelves in our Military History aisle, the Korean War section, just in case, but no luck.

So I Googled Katherine Jones! I love Google! Anyhoo, I found a website for her, info on ordering that particular book directly from her, and info and a phone number for ordering through Author House. So I made that old soldier happy!

Then, later that day, an old soldier called me on the phone. "I'm looking for a book," he said. "Do you have time to hear my story?"

"OK," I said, and he told one! It was a story about being on a ship with other soldiers going back and forth to Pearl Harbor and then one day not being allowed on the upper decks. He said he then read the book The Revolt of Mamie Stover and figured out what was going on! They were transporting prostitutes! The book is actually a novel by William Bradford Huie, but it was based on Huie's wartime experiences, and is about a woman abused by Hollywood who turns into a war profiteer of this particular sort!

Well, this is a book we actually had, a Signet paperback mentioning the film version, but not the 1951 cover pictured at the Wikipedia article. You can see the whole cover, front and back, above! It used to sell for a few cents, but our glamorous well-read copy was now around $20, as a vintage edition. He definitely wanted to read it again, so we sent it off. And he didn't know about the film, which he can now also seek out! What old soldier wouldn't want to see a film set in Hawaii and starring Jane Russell?!

So I made another old soldier happy!

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I am reading All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg, published in 1997. Again, I read things when I get around to it, when they are chosen by my book group, when something compels me to read a particular book at a particular time. Or to re-read it. Right now I am struck by this passage about the Korean War:

The dead waved from the ditches in Korea. The arms of the soldiers reached out from bodies half in, half out of the frozen mud, as if begging for help even after their hearts had cooled and the ice had glazed their eyes. They had been shot to rags by machine guns and frozen by a subzero wind, leaving olive-drab statues in the killing, numbing cold in the mountains in the north.

I read this to my husband while he was shaving, before he set off for volleyball practice (he's the coach), because it relates to his paintings. He paints bodies or portions of bodies in agony (sometimes indistinguishable from ecstasy) and often emerging from water or mud. He understood immediately and said he'd read about the terrible conditions and cold of Korea during that war.

This, like The Tender Bar, which we also read for my book group, is a memoir by a man with a strong and admirable mother and a troubled and troubling father. Again, writers coping with their fathers, something I've been told I have to do if I'm a writer, and something I just keep avoiding. I notice that both these memoirists are honoring their mothers as they cope with their fathers, a pattern I might of course repeat.

We read The Great Gatsby, at my suggestion, after The Tender Bar by J. R. Moehringer, because the locale is the same, and the consequences of "careless people." I love the intersections of fiction and nonfiction, past and present.

So this passage grapples with that vision, that experience of war. My husband's paintings tend to grapple with his sense of loss, alienation, the violence of being ripped from the mother country. He is painting hands right now, and music is being composed and a dance choreographed in response to his hand paintings, to be performed in early April at Columbus Dance Theatre in Columbus, Ohio. More about that as it comes up.

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