Boy Soldier: Coming of Age During World War II

It is said that in order to completely understand a man you should probe the world as it existed when he was 19 or 20 years old–at the moment he became mature and autonomous as a man. Russell McLogan has done just that in this well-written autobiography. Drafted out of college at age 18 in 1944, he was trained as a rifleman and then sent to the Philippines as an infantry replacement. There he joined the battle hardened 6th Infantry Division on the Shimbu Line near Manila. Wounded in combat in northern Luzon, he spent 89 days in Army hospitals on Luzon and Leyte. When the atomic bomb abruptly ended the war, he was returned to duty just in time to sail off to Korea where he served in the Army of Occupation. Boy Soldier is about a young man’s coming of age during this period of tremendous historical change. It includes much well-researched history of the Army’s replacement training system, the Liberation of the Philippines, the dropping of the atomic bombs, the American-Russian occupation of Korea, and the Army’s post-war demobilization–the people, places, and events that shaped a young life. Although written in a scholarly mode with endnotes, bibliography and index, it is very readable with the humor, violence, sexual situations and sometimes raw language as it actually happpened. Text is supplemented with 72 illustrations and 15 maps.