Reckless: The Racehorse Who Became a Marine Corps Hero

[Stephanie]

I don't know if this the right forum for this but I just ran across it...Looks like it might be good

SNIP:
A 900-pound lean, green fighting machine.

By Tom Clavin
(NAL/Penguin, 308 pages, $28.95)
Tom Clavin’s Reckless is a story of courage and sacrifice and suffering and of the remarkable bond that can develop between man and animals. It’s the story of brave Marines who gave their all in a brutal war that was called a “police action,” a war which few Americans paid much attention to, or gave much due to the warriors who fought it on their behalf.
There are many heroes in this book, Americans who can never be thanked enough for their sacrifice and their service. Central to the story is a 900-pound, female Marine with four legs, a former Korean racehorse named Reckless, who eventually ran for much higher stakes than she ever would have on any racetrack.
Depending on her performance were the lives of American Marines, badly outnumbered by determined Chinese troops in the vicious and long-running battle of the Nevada Cities in March of 1953 in Korea. The outcome of the battle, and the positioning of troops on each side that came out of it, was strategically important to the long-winded negotiators at Panmunjom, who finally managed to arrive at a truce just months after the battle in which Reckless and her fellow Marines so distinguished themselves. A truce, uneasy for more than a half century, which is still in force.
I lift this inspirational book up to TAS readers. It illuminates a little known chapter in American military history. And it contains great personal stories. But it comes with a warning. Much of it is not for the faint of heart. Clavin does not dwell on the horrors of combat. But he doesn’t airbrush anything out either. He tells a story -- which includes every aspect of infantry combat – straight. (Clavin performed the same service in Halsey’s Typhoon of 2007, the story of Admiral Halsey’s Pacific Fleet at war with a monster Pacific typhoon in 1944. Clavin co-authored this one with Bob Drury. It’s still available and well worth the time.)
Reckless came to be a Marine through the efforts of Lieutenant Eric Pederson, a WWII enlisted veteran who retired as a captain after Korea. The way infantry combat shaped up in Korea, the American 75-millimeter recoilless rifle was an extremely effective weapon, in fact, an equalizer for the always outnumbered Marines. Not an ordinary rifle, but a smallish and portable piece of artillery, the recoilless rifle packed an explosive wallop. Its shells could pierce just about anything, including tanks. And unlike regular artillery that is called in from over the horizon, recoilless rifle gunners could see what they were shooting at. The Chinese hated it.

ALL of it here:
Semper-Fi on Four Legs | The American Spectator