Charles Hughes
Personal Info
- First Name
- Charles
- Last Name
- Hughes
- My Location
- Arkansas
- My Service
- Marine Corps
- My Status
- Veteran
- My Military Career Field
- hospital corpsman, Korea, Marine, rifle company
- About Me
I spent four years in the U.S. Navy enlisting in 1948 at the age of seventeen. During the closing weeks of 1950 while the 1st Marine Division was surrounded and fighting their way out of the Chinese Communist trap at the frozen Chosin Reservoir, I and my friend Ollie Langston volunteered for the Fleet Marine Force to serve as hospital corpsmen in a Marine rifle company. We had missed World War II and wanted to find out what combat was like. My book, Accordion War, tells the story of that experience.
Today I am professor emeritus of English at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. I graduated with a BA in political science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1957 and for the next nine years worked in communication intelligence for the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and later the Air Force Security Service as a cryptanalyst (Russian), instructor of cryptanalysis, technical writer (cryptanalysis), technical editor, and finally as the Chief of the Editing and Publications Branch of the USAFSS School at Goodfellow AFB, San Angelo, Texas.
I left that position in 1966 to attend graduate school at Texas Tech University at Lubbock where I received an MA (1968) and a PhD (1971) in literature and linguistics after which I was hired by Henderson State where I taught up to and after my retirement in 1996, serving for five of those years as Chairman of the English and Foreign Languages Department.
- Words of Wisdom
Whatever wisdom I have I have put in my book, "Accordion War: 1951--Life and Death in a Marine Rifle Company." You can take a look at in at www.trafford.com/06-0192 and it can be ordered at amazon.com or borders.com.
If you are a Korean veteran and have looked for books on our war in bookstores, you've discovered that that conflict has really lived up to the name "the forgotten war." It's difficult to find the few books on our war sandwiched in between WWII, Vietnam and all the other wars. But as a Korean veteran you'll be acutely aware of the injustice of that neglect. The Korean war was a big war with tremendous historical consequences, the only one since WWII that involved two powerful armies confronting one another along a clear MLR, and and the destruction which resulted and the prices paid in that violent three years deserves more attention. David Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter" has redressed the balance, but only a bit.
History
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