Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice Paperback – March 21, 2017

Makos's book tells the true story of the friendship between Jessie Brown, the first African American naval aviator, and Tom Hudner, a privileged white man from Massachusetts who turns down a Harvard education in order to attend the Naval Academy to become a fighter during the Korean War. Jessie invariably faces discrimination from some of his squadron mates, but Tom is able to see past the man's skin color. Makos, journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, A Higher Call, spent years interviewing family members of Jessie, Hudner, veterans, and old crew members--in addition to travelling to the battlefields in Korea-- to share this story of Tom and Jessie.Devotion takes the reader on Tom and Jessie's first deployment, allowing the reader to get to know them and the rest of the flyers on a more intimate level. An extensive portion of the book is also devoted to telling the story of the U.S. Marines engaged on the ground, thereby giving the reader a much broader context in which to consider the story of the two main figures. Tom and Jessie's friendship deepens as they fly missions in support of the Marines fighting on the ground, and it is during one of these missions that Jessie's aircraft succumbs to enemy fire, forcing him to crash land in enemy territory. Tom, showing the extent of the devotion to his friend, purposefully crashes his perfectly operable aircraft in an attempt to help free Jessie from the wreckage and flee to safety. Makos's writing is so well crafted, that the reader feels that they're experiencing combat themselves.I like that Makos tells the story of two men who may have never been friends if not for the war or maybe even military service in general. Tom came from a successful family- his father owned a grocery store; Jessie came from a family of sharecroppers. Both men were extremely patriotic, and that patriotism is woven throughout the chapters of this book. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and have recommended it to friends and family, all of whom have enjoyed the read. It is nice to see an author like Makos so fully devoted to his work--the amount of research performed and also travelling to Korea with Hudner-- enabling the reader to experience what the heroes of the Korean War encountered and carry with them to this day. This is a legacy worth reading.

Now that the movie adaptation (which I haven't seen) of this book is out and I've seen all the Hollywood posters, I was expecting this book to be a singular "human interest" tale about two pilots of different races bonding and then accomplishing some heroic feat in combat. I'm a fan of aviation and have always been fascinated by modern war history, so why not give it a go? But this book turned out not to be what I expected. It is indeed a remarkable war tale involving two exceptional men of different backgrounds. However it is also so much more than that. At Devotion’s core is a harrowing re-counting of the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir--one of the Korean War's most significant and horrifying battles--as told from the viewpoints of multiple real people both on the ground and in the air.*** The author attempts to put you into the frostbitten bodies of its main characters as they haplessly endure wave after wave of night attacks from bayonet-baring Chinese soldiers, all the while praying for air support that cannot come.Starting from the book's second third, along came numerous educational tidbits for my brain: for instance, the war being "Korean," I never knew how much of it was played out primarily by Chinese soldiers (the US was once kind of unofficially at war with China?!), who essentially surrounded and slaughtered some 800 American servicemen on their first pass. I never knew how weapons froze at night so commonly that skirmishes were won or lost via bayonet and hand-to-hand combat (ugh). I never knew that so many Chinese and North Korean POWs elected NOT to return to their home countries at the war's end (what a telling choice), and that the thorny issue of their repatriation was what kept the war going for so long.Surely, Devotion is flawed in some ways; for instance, the book's preamble took up at least the entire first third of the book and I personally found it way too long. (For instance, why are so many pages spent on Elizabeth Taylor’s pre-combat interactions with the USS Leyte’s crew, again told from multiple viewpoints? It made the story feel paltry, and was an ironic choice considering the author later specifically footnotes that Elizabeth Taylor’s subsequent request to visit the Leyte was denied for the reason that she would detract from the gravity of events . . . ) This portion could certainly have been condensed without losing too much backdrop. That said, if anyone feels this first third is losing them, I’d definitely recommend to keep on reading. Once the real combat begins, the story does not disappoint.Given the perplexing dearth of accessible American books about the Korean War, I feel this book is sorely needed. It has always vexed me to that so many lives, including 37,000 American ones, were spent securing the freedom of today's 51 million South Koreans--and yet we seem to have forgotten them. Without the sacrifice of so many young men, we would have no K-Pop, K-dramas, Samsung, Hyundai! (If only the US had been able to claim such a partial victory in Vietnam . . . given my own Vietnamese heritage, I look at South Korea and think about this particular "what if" all the time.) It seems a grave injustice that the suffering these men endured, and what they accomplished as a result, has largely been eclipsed by narratives surrounding WWII and the Vietnam War. This book is one more much-needed chip in the battle against that injustice. At its end, I felt real gratitude to Adam Makos and his staff for undertaking the painstaking work of gathering and telling these men's stories. What love this must have required. Bravo.***EDIT: For those who liked the photographs in Devotion and are interested in the VISUALS of the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir (and of the Korean War in general), I would highly recommend the documentary “American Experience: The Battle of Chosin,” which is available on Prime Video (and is included in a Prime subscription). It contains excellent footage of many of the devastating details included in Makos’ book, including Chinese night assaults on American Marines, eventual air support (Corsairs and Skyraiders!), and the 14-mile withdrawal march to Hungnam Bay. It also features numerous veteran interviews including with Red Parkinson, one of Devotion’s primary characters.