Unit Pride

by John McAleer and Billy Dickson

Published 27 August 1981
Two young soldiers come together in the trenches to form a strong friendship amidst the bombshells and bloodshed of the Korean War. Billy, the brawler with a chip on his shoulder, is only a seventeen-year-old punk from the slums of Boston. Dewey is a tough, young Texan who boasts he's not afraid of killing or being killed. These two strangers' lives are thrown together and altered forever by a war that we couldn't win. Unit Pride, hailed as one of the greatest war stories of our time, tells not only of the wages of war, but of the bond of friendship in unlikely places. For both Billy and Dewey, it was kill or be killed, and each looked to the other to make it through the war alive. In the worst of times they leaned on each other to survive nightmarish ordeals such as watching a prisoner get rifle--whipped in the face, then hearing him get shot to death in a nearby thicket. In the best of times they staved off boredom and depression by befriending French troops and patronizing the local Japanese brothels. Unit Pride is the emotional and gripping story of mid-twentieth-century warfare, of courage and camaraderie, and what it takes to be a hero.