Corporal Boskin's Cold Cold War - by Joseph Boskin (Hardcover)

About the Book

An engaging and comic memoir about a top secret mission to Greenland during the Korean War.

Book Synopsis

At the height of the Korean War in 1952, a budding young historian was drafted into the U.S. Army just as the Pentagon was organizing a top-secret, scientific expeditionary unit, the Transportation Arctic Group (TRARG). Consisting of 275 military members and a cluster of civilian scientists from the United States and other countries, TRARG was sent to Thule Air Force Base, located on the west coast of northern Greenland. Its ostensible purpose was to map the terrain and test complex equipment at the edges of the Ice Cap. The covert objective, however, was to determine the feasibility of constructing yet another air base on the other side of Greenland, one that would be much closer to the enemy.

As the sole historian of the unit, Corporal Boskin was responsible for compiling and transmitting weekly progress reports to the Pentagon and, at the conclusion of the mission, for assisting in the final assessment. The multivolume report was itself technically worthy, yet it possessed barely a hint of the personal story: the outsized characters, the dark comedy and real tragedy, the frustrations and waste, and the ongoing tug'of'war between the company commander and his corporal historian over the status of the report's basic contents. Here Boskin tells that story, a keenly observed narrative that delivers both the absurd and the sublime in equal measure.

Review Quotes

A distinguished authority on the role of humor in American culture, Joseph Boskin is a comedic genius in his own right. In his new book, which is set on the icy tundra of Greenland, home of Thule Air Force Base during the Korean War, truth is stranger than fiction. Those with a quirky sense of reality will love Corporal Boskin's Cold Cold War.-- "Bill Tuttle, author of "Daddy's Gone to War" The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children"