From Publishers Weekly
This impressive first novel is based on McCormick's WW 11 experience with the elite Marine Raiders, later consolidated as the 4th Marines. Unpretentious prose and a straightforward narrative style highlight the grim realities of combat against Japanese forces in the Solomons, on Guam, and above all, on Okinawa. Episodes set outside battle areas convincingly depict Raider training and attitudes. Pvt. Moe, the narrator, and his comrades are products of the Depression, more likely to have served in the CCC than to have graduated from high school. They do not question their roles in the right kind of war, waged without pity or hatred against an absolute enemy. McCormick's understated prose ultimately enhances his presentation of the value system promulgated in the Marine Corps. By urging Marines to objectivize the enemy, thereby encouraging detachment, they brought about the Corps's evolution into a warrior elite--America's samurai. 25,000 first printing.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This episodic first novel, written by a veteran of World War II, so realistically details the activities of a company of U.S. Marine Corps Raiders during the Pacific campaign that the reader suspects it is actually thinly veiled autobiography. Told from a private's viewpoint, it follows the Raiders across several Pacific islands as they fight the Japanese as well as their other enemies--disease, fear, and boredom. Spanning the months between July 1943 and September 1945, this tale is of a simpler time when the United States was right and everyone else was wrong, and "the Pacific War was the right kind of war, the simple war in which there were not the distractions of things like pity or Geneva conventions." Obviously no pacifist or antiwar sentiments here. Sure to be popular with World War II fans.
- Rebecca House Stankowski, Purdue Univ. Calumet Lib., Hammond, Ind.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A Marine Raider veteran of the war in the Pacific puts his WW II battle memories into unsentimental, unrevisionist novel form. No-nonsense prose--plus a refusal to load in five decades of postwar psychochat or political hindsight--keeps McCormick's account of island-hopping and man-to-man combat crystal-clear and unusually immediate. Today's gentle readers may find themselves gasping to discover that the ``Right Kind of War'' for the Marine Raiders was a war in which no questions were asked and few prisoners taken. But for the young men yanked from their farms and blue-collar jobs to defend democracy from Japanese expansionism, it was the only way to fight. As the Pacific war was a series of battles fought island by island, the novel is a series of anecdotes leading to the horrors of Okinawa and Guam. The narrator is a matter-of-fact Illinoisan fighting alongside boys from all over the country, following the orders of sergeants more frightening than the enemy, doing the bidding of generals and admirals who may or may not know what they are about. There are no detailed portraits of the boys, everything is action, but there are amusing moments- -and moving ones--and flitting through the narrative are spooky appearances and reappearances of a boot-camp buddy who became an assassin for the corps and kept his job classification afterward. Gung-ho and good. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
