Second Book; First Line

I don't ever do this . . . read two books at once, but I have been lately.

When I was younger it was anathema for me to have anything else on my mind, much less be reading another book, while in the midst of reading one. But lately, when I go to sleep, I put the smart phone away, no Twitter, no Facebooks, no Blogs, no Kindle,  . . . nope, nothing but a good old fashioned book.

Sure I still have the Kindle book I'm reading, I just don't read it before going to sleep. For sleeping I read a real, page turning book.

Right now I'm reading Hampton Sides' "On Desperate Ground," (see here) a non-fiction account of the Korean War and the Marines at the Chosin Reservoir. The Korean War is easily one of my favorite conflicts, and Hampton Sides, writer of Ghost Soldiers as well, is one of my favorite non-fiction authors.

The first line, which I read before hitting the rack the other night, was:

In the misting rain, they pressed against the metal skins of their boats and peeked over the gunwales for a glimpse of the shores they were about to attack. Some thirteen thousand men of the First Marine Division, the spearhead of the invasion, had clambered down from the ships on swinging nets of rope and then had crammed themselves into a motley flotilla of craft that now wallowed and bobbed in the channel. Several of the rusty old hulks, having been commandeered from Japanese trawlermen, smelled of sour urine and rotten fish heads. The Marines, many of them green from seasickness, saw the outlines of the charred foothills that rose above the port, and caught the scent of the brackish marshes and the slime of the mudflats. Corsairs, bent-winged like swallows, dove over the city, dropping thousand-pound bombs and sending five-inch rockets deep into hillside nests where the enemy was said to be dug in. Far out at sea, the naval guns rained fire upon the city, damaging tanks of butane that now flared and belched palls of smoke.

On this warm, humid morning of September 15, 1950, the Marines had arrived at their destination halfway around the world, to stun their foe and turn the war around: a surprise amphibious attack, on an immense scale, deep behind the battle lines. Only a few months before, these young men, fresh from their farms and hick towns, had piled into chartered trains and clattered across America to California. Then they climbed aboard transport ships, where many of them did their basic training, learning how to strip and rebuild M1 rifles, drilling on the crowded decks, practicing their marksmanship on floating targets towed from the fantails. They crossed the Pacific and stopped briefly in Japan, then heaved their way through a full-scale typhoon. They rounded the peninsula and moved in convoy up the west coast, through the silted waters of the Yellow Sea.

Sides, Hampton - On Desperate Ground

That's a great opening right there. Who couldn't want but to read on!