William Winship

The Canandaigua Letters William Winship

In the late 1960s, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung gazed down across the Chinese mainland and-observing half a million U. S. ground troops mired in Vietnam-decided that the moment had arrived to push the Americans off the Korean peninsula and foment an insurgency in the South. The Pentagon countered by deploying a handful of infantry battalions from the U. S. Army's Second Division along an eighteen-mile stretch of the Demilitarized Zone, fronting North Korea's traditional invasion route. What followed was a war that waxed and waned over the course of three years along the Korean DMZ-and so successfully did the Pentagon suppress all reports of this conflict that the story is still unknown today.

The Canandaigua Letters provides a stunningly vivid account of the final year of this military conflict, documented by an Emmy-nominated director and multi-award-winning writer, who looks back half a century to the moment he flunked out of college as a beleaguered sophomore, was yanked from the sanctuary of a Midwestern liberal arts school, and drafted into the U. S. Army.

"The most comprehensive and compelling account of the military journey in the Vietnam era-and the bonds that soldiers forged along that path. An astonishing feat of memory." -Lt. Col. (ret.) Thomas W. Rutledge, U. S. Army