This official U.S. Marine Corps history provides unique information about an important aspect of the Korean War. Some of the subjects included in this history: Major General Field Harris, Colonel Lewis B. Chesty Puller, Major General Oliver P. Smith, 1st Marine Division, General Douglas MacArthur, President Truman, USS Mount McKinley, Wolmi-Do, the drive to Kimpo, amphibious assault, DUKWs.

Fresh out of a Defiance, Ohio, high school, Thomas Boyd (1898-1935) joined the Marines to serve his country in the patriotic heat of the spring of 1917. In 1919 he came home from the war with a Croix de Guerre and a desire to write. He joined the St. Paul News as a journalist and opened a bookstore, whose patrons included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. Through the Wheat appeared to immediate acclaim, with F. Scott Fitzgerald calling it "a work of art" and "arresting." Boyd wrote five other works before he died in Vermont of a cerebral hemorrhage at age thirty-seven. Introducing this Bison Books edition is Edwin Howard Simmons, a retired brigadier general in the United States Marine Corps and the author of The United States Marines: A History.