Korea Between the Wars: A Soldier's Story

Another soldier McLogan's memoir “Boy Soldier: Coming of Age During World War II” also has two chapters on life in the same 63rd Infantry Regiment (6th Infantry Division) in Kunsan, South Korea and is a good book for comparison. Ottoboni's memoir is hands down, much better. His recollections of his days stationed in Kunsan are filled with much greater personal detail, including frequent extended quotations from his letters of the time, and thus offers the reader with a much richer range of material from the personal experiences of a single soldier.

Unfortunately from the perspective of someone interested in the history of Korean society, Ottoboni had very little interaction with Koreans and observed very little of what was going on in the Korea between the wars. This memoir does provide, however, the reader with a lot of anecdotes that show the incredibly poor state of supply for US troops stationed in Korea from 1947-1948 (when Ottoboni was there) and for some of the mistreatment of Koreans by US soldiers.