Summer Wind: A Soldier's Road from Indiana to Vietnam
By Randy & Roxanne Mills, Foreword by Gary E. May
Using these letters, and materials such as interviews, diary and journal entries, military reports, recorded air-to-ground conversations, newspaper articles, memoir pieces, and military history accounts, Randy and Roxanne Mills weave together a tale with the greatest amount of context, delivering an astounding awareness of the incredible stress of combat—both on the combatants and the “folks back home.” The story is a real-time chronicling of the impact of the war on all concerned—family, friends, and the community where Dick Wolfe grew up—written with a simple eloquence that puts flesh on the skeleton of understanding of war’s pervasive and lasting effects.
Unexpected Journey: A Marine Corps Reserve Company in the Korean War
By Randy & Roxanne Mills
In the fifty years since the Korean War dominated America's headlines, the poor state of readiness of U.S. armed forces at the beginning of that conflict has faded from memory. Yet, in those early days of desperate combat-when victory and even survival were far from certain-many Americans were rapidly deployed to this new-found war zone, deplorably unprepared for the challenges that awaited them. By focusing on one unit-a Marine Corps Reserve company called to active duty with no warning and virtually no time to prepare-this meticulously researched and vividly presented account makes clear what these individuals faced and how they coped.
This is a human story that takes the reader into the personal lives of the participants and provides a view of post-World War II American society. Through the lens of this detailed look at one company in a nearly forgotten war, important issues come into view that are relevant today. The efforts of the Marine Corps to remain adequately prepared for combat in a time when economic and political considerations mandate a military drawdown have particular relevance to current debates, and the trials and tribulations recounted here are rife with lessons for today's planners, trainers, and warriors. The authors have blended documentary research with newspaper accounts of the day, interviews with participants, personal correspondence, and diaries to reconstruct this amazing story of what happened when a group of young people from middle America were called upon to make an unexpected journey.
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Honoring Those Who Paid the Price: Forgotten Voices from the Korean War
By Randy Mills
In December 1950 Donald Hamilton, a medic with the Eighth Army's Seventh Division, became trapped with the rest of his comrades under a fierce onslaught by Chinese troops at the Chosin Reservoir. As Hamilton prepared to escape to safety, he heard a fellow soldier scream for help. Disregarding a friend's plea not to return, Hamilton went back to offer aid. He was never seen again. Donald Hamilton is one of the 927 Hoosiers killed in the Korean War. The story of those who died, those who served, and the loved ones back home who struggled to understand the horrors of war are examined in this book. Randy K. Mills personally interviewed a number of Hoosier veterans of the war, reviewed letters from veterans to loved ones back home, perused local and national media accounts, and consulted definitive historical studies about the conflict.
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Troubled Hero: A Medal of Honor, Vietnam, and the War at Home
By Randy Mills
Born in rural Illinois, Ken Kays was a country boy who flunked out of college and wound up serving as a medic in the Vietnam War. On May 7, 1970, after only 17 days in Vietnam and one day after joining a new platoon, the young medic found himself in a ferocious battle. As a conscientious objector, Kays did not carry any weapons, but his actions during that engagement would earn him the Congressional Medal of Honor. Kays’ valor came during just another unheralded fire fight near the end of a long and seemingly fruitless war. He returned home and, with other vets, struggled to reconcile his anti-war beliefs with what he and others had done in Vietnam. This dramatic and tragic story is a timely reminder of the price of war and the fragile comforts of peace.
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Jonathan Jennings: Indiana's First Governor (Indiana Biography Series)
By Randy Mills
During the rough-and-tumble world of frontier Indiana politics, two men stood head and shoulders above their contemporaries—William Henry Harrison and Jonathan Jennings. Harrison, the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, established a powerful political machine as governor of the Indiana Territory and went on to become the ninth president of the United States. Jennings stood as Harrison’s biggest rival, leading the fight to keep slavery out of the Hoosier State.
History, however, has not been kind to Jennings, who became Indiana’s first governor and served four terms in Congress. In this fourth volume of the Indiana Historical Society Press’s Indiana Biography Series, Randy K. Mills, noted historian and writer, has produced a groundbreaking look at Jennings, one of the nineteenth state’s most complex and fascinating figures. Mills details how Jennings worked his way up the state’s political ladder to become a hero of mythical stature to some, winning praise as "a young Hercules" and "the Colossus of Indiana," a champion of freedom and hero of the people.
Jennings’s rise to the pinnacle of power in Indiana quickly turned to tragedy as he wrestled with alcoholism. By his death in 1832 at the relatively young age of fifty, Jennings had fallen far in the hearts and minds of the Hoosier public. For several decades, no gravestone marked Jennings’s final resting place. Using personal letters, official government records, and newspaper and diary accounts, this biography presents a more thorough and balanced assessment of Indiana’s first governor. The book also illuminates an important period in Indiana and American history as well, a time when "electioneering madness" played a major role in the life of the country.
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Christ Tasted Death for Every Man: The Story of America’s Frontier General Baptists
By Randy Mills, Foreword by Dr. Douglas Low
The story of a young preacher who moves with his wife and daughter from Kentucky to the frontier "pocket of Indiana" where he discovers a growing Baptist movement. His preaching skills are quickly noticed, and he becomes the pastor of a newly constituted church, a former arm of one of the oldest churches in the area. Problems soon arise, however. He comes to realize that he is not in Kentucky any longer and that the Baptist movement in frontier Indiana faces significant and difficult questions of identity and practice. In the heat of this struggle for identification, Benoni Stinson and the Baptists of the Pocket make decisions and take actions, the major concequences of which which no one could have foreseen in 1822.
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At the Eye of the Storm*
By Randy & Roxanne Mills
*At the Eye of the Storm is a paperback edition of Unexpected Journey: A Marine Corps Reserve Company in the Korean War.
In the fifty years since the Korean War dominated America's headlines, the poor state of readiness of U.S. armed forces at the beginning of that conflict has faded from memory. Yet, in those early days of desperate combat-when victory and even survival were far from certain-many Americans were rapidly deployed to this new-found war zone, deplorably unprepared for the challenges that awaited them. By focusing on one unit-a Marine Corps Reserve company called to active duty with no warning and virtually no time to prepare-this meticulously researched and vividly presented account makes clear what these individuals faced and how they coped.
This is a human story that takes the reader into the personal lives of the participants and provides a view of post-World War II American society. Through the lens of this detailed look at one company in a nearly forgotten war, important issues come into view that are relevant today. The efforts of the Marine Corps to remain adequately prepared for combat in a time when economic and political considerations mandate a military drawdown have particular relevance to current debates, and the trials and tribulations recounted here are rife with lessons for today's planners, trainers, and warriors. The authors have blended documentary research with newspaper accounts of the day, interviews with participants, personal correspondence, and diaries to reconstruct this amazing story of what happened when a group of young people from middle America were called upon to make an unexpected journey.