We Were Innocents

"Offers a well-written account of the experiences of GI Joe... It does for the Korean conflict what Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front did for WW I - it reveals the profound effect war has on the lives of the combatants." - Choice "Oddly affecting, combining as it does the aimless routine in military service (even in wartime) with the punctual moments of sheer terror that make the modern war memoir simultaneously so gripping and so confusing." - Virginia Quarterly Review "Provides a fine soldier's view of war, perceiving its often cruel and stupid process but also seeing times when his fellow soldiers and sometimes even the enemy could escape the dehumanizing callousness of war in redemptive behavior." - Robert W. Lewis, North Dakota Quarterly "Dannenmaier has a gift for layering incident upon incident, detail upon detail so that readers gradually build up a richly textured picture of an infantryman's life in Korea... I was a journalist covering veterans affairs for more than six years and in that time I heard a lot of war stories and read many more. This is one of the very best." - Mark Allen Peterson, Stars and Stripes Quoted from interview on Military.com "What would you like readers to come away with from the book?" "I'd like this to be an anti-war book. We've got to stop this nonsense. There have got to be better ways to solve problems than to send a bunch of young men off to kill each other." ADVANCE PRAISE "A little classic. Its real strength is that it brings back this 'police action' so vividly."- David C. Smith, coeditor of American Women in a World at War: Contemporary Accounts from World War II "Based largely on letters that Dannenmaier wrote to family members during the conflict, this memoir skillfully weaves primary documents with the author's later analysis to make an account that is often captivating in its immediacy and thought-provoking in its reflectiveness. Transparently honest, occasionally touching, and frequently humorous, We Were Innocents is war literature of a high order."- Malcolm Muir Jr., Austin Peay State University