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Private Hesh in Korea
Gordon Haber
Private Hesh in Korea
Sam Ellis, author of How to Be a Heroine and Chopping Onions on My Heart (US: Always Carry Salt)A riveting portrait of male friendship in a forgotten war; I was captivated and engrossed.
Nalini Jones, author of The Unbroken CoastPrivate Hesh in Korea is a riveting novel of war, loss, loyalty, self-revelation, and perhaps most powerfully, friendship. Haber’s unflinching evocation of a young infantryman’s experience in Korea is a true literary accomplishment, fiercely compelling, richly layered, and deeply human.
About the book
Private Hesh in Korea tells the story of Herschel Marx, a child of divorce and the Depression, who is drafted into the US Army in July 1950. A month later, he’s fighting in the mountains above the Naktong River in South Korea. He finds a best friend in Nick Martinelli, who takes to combat a little too readily, but is as vulnerable as everyone else in his unit to the punishing terrain and the terrifying onslaught by the North Koreans.
In this military coming-of-age story, instead of going to university, Hesh goes to Korea: while struggling to survive a vicious conflict, Hesh scrounges, wheels and deals, unexpectedly rising through the ranks and discovering a capacity for self-reliance. Meanwhile, the US Army is finally integrating, which creates new tensions between white and black soldiers, even as Hesh is exposed to the antisemitism of fellow combatants. And then there’s the war at home, with tensions neither forgotten nor dealt with.
Private Hesh in Korea sheds light on a little-understood episode in world history, in the interval between the Second World War and Vietnam. The product of intense research, including interviewing Korean War veterans and delving into primary sources, the novel offers an immersive investigation into themes of race, class, and manhood.
Its aim throughout is accuracy—about the war, mid-century American culture, and sensory details of place—without overburdening the storytelling. Every page was written with the reader in mind, and with the need to tell a dark story with sensitivity and humor.
With its focus on confused young men at war, Private Hesh in Korea shares qualities with Tim O’Brien’s classic The Things They Carried and Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong. More recently, Jeff Shaara’s best-seller The Frozen Hours has demonstrated a market for fiction about the Korean War.
Endorsements
Ed Gruber, former US Navy Combat Correspondent, Korean War VeteranI don’t know how Haber did it. It’s amazing how he captures the gritty essences of military life and men in combat. This is magic.
Mike Heppner, author of The Egg Code and Your Thoughts Are Important to UsGordon Haber writes about the horror and confusion of war through the lens of a generally good guy who just wants to escape with his life and self-respect intact. There are shades of Hemingway, but also Heller. With humor and an eye for period detail, Private Hesh in Korea says something new about that most time-embalmed creature, the mid-Twentieth Century American male.
Peter Manseau, National Jewish Book Award winning author of Songs for the Butcher’s DaughterA new classic novel of Americans at war. By turns mordantly funny, wryly philosophical, and truly terrifying, Private Hesh in Korea captures the madness of battle and the messy humanity that somehow survives it.
Max Ludington, author of Thorn Tree and Tiger in a TrancePrivate Hesh in Korea is funny and brutal in equal measure, and I found myself captivated. This is historical fiction of the highest order—by which I mean of course that it is fiction of the highest order. Its engine is its characters—their humanity, the raw immediacy of their lives—and “history” is simply the world they inhabit. A superb novel.
Aaron Hamburger, author of Hotel Cuba and The Shiva BanditIn hard-bitten, muscular prose, Gordon Haber brings to life a soldier’s experience of the Korean War. Cinematic, brash, and often moving, this taut novel grabs the reader’s attention with its violent beauty and won’t let go.
Elisa Albert, author of Human BluesHaber is the love-child of Denis Johnson and Saul Bellow, working at the height of his powers. Private Hesh is an un-put-downable war novel about an indelible individual, family, and historical moment. That the heroics herein are somewhat common makes them no less stunning.
Jim Shepard, author of Phase Six and The World to ComePrivate Hesh in Korea is harrowing and funny, and a pitch-perfect rendering of time and place and voice. It’s also at once a mordant evocation of how some Jewish- and African-Americans in mid-century negotiated bigotry with neither self-pity nor meekness, an affecting portrait of how one young and frightened soldier proved himself more competent than he might ever have imagined, and a viscerally compelling account of that first stage of the Korean War when the terrifying intervention of the Chinese Army transformed what seemed like reassuring success into a mortifying defeat.
David Levinson, author of Tell Me How This Ends Well and Antonia Lively Breaks the SilencePrivate Hesh in Korea is a work of art and comedic genius—a breathtaking portrait of a time and place, and more so of one man’s loneliness in a world that has been designed to abandon him. Herschel “Hesh” Marx is eighteen, Jewish, and drafted into a war nobody expected, shipping out of Tacoma alongside fifteen hundred boys who don’t know a rifle from a rumor. What follows is profane, hilarious, and unbearably tender: chow-line philosophy, gallows humor sharp enough to draw blood, and a friendship with a Brooklyn tough named Nick that becomes the only home Hesh has ever really had. Gordon Haber writes combat with unflinching precision and comedy with the same precision—often in the same sentence—building toward an ending that lands like a gut-punch you can see coming and can’t stop. This is a Korean War novel unlike any other: a coming-of-age story about a boy the world keeps finding new ways to leave behind.
Lauren Grodstein, author of A Dog In Georgia and We Must Not Think of OurselvesPrivate Hesh in Korea is everything I want in a war novel: smart, gritty, and impossible to stop reading. Gordon Haber is an extraordinary talent.
Gordon Haber
About the author