Praise from a Korean War Historian

Some more praise for War Remains from Andrew Salmon, author of To The Last Round:

In middle-class middle America, the accidental discovery of a missing veteran’s footlocker jogs buried memories of the Korean conflict. This is the starting point for Jeffrey Miller’s “War Remains,” a novel themed around war, amnesia and remembrance that is published, appropriately, on the 60th anniversary year of the conflict’s eruption.

There are few American historians or novelists of the Korean War; fewer still with first-hand knowledge of Korea’s landscapes or people. Miller, an American resident of South Korea and former columnist for The Korea Times, is the exception. Having interviewed dozens of veterans, he is as familiar with the soldier’s gun-sight view of the battlefield as with the big picture presented in cold war political histories.

Miller’s protagonist is a just-married soldier in the US 2nd Infantry Division, an ill-starred unit that endured some of the most hideous battles of the war. As his grandson searches for information about the grandfather he never met, the novel’s switching of locales between millennial USA and 1950-1 Korea carries the contemporary reader deep into this largely unknown but still simmering conflict

Unlike World War II and Vietnam, Korea was never memorably captured in literature or on film. “War Remains” helps fill that gap. Miller’s novel casts vivid light on a forgotten conflict in which superpower grappled with superpower on Asia’s grimmest killing fields, but his real achievement is in the poignant illumination he sheds upon the human cost stemming from statesmen’s failures.