Additional information
by James Presley (Author)
Charles Jefferson Rhea, freshly graduated from high school, made a life-changing decision in the summer of 1918. With the Navy's quotas filled, he joined the Marines. An Idaho native who grew up in Texas, Charlie, as his friends and family called him, was soon in France with the Fifth Marines of the AEF's Second Division in the Great War, which one historian calls "perhaps the most important single event of the entire twentieth century." Quickly thrown into combat on the Western Front, Rhea's challenge was to stay alive as shelling and machine guns killed men all around him. He endured savage fighting at St. Mihiel, Blanc Mont Ridge, and the Meuse-Argonne offensive--and struggled to find food, water, and shelter--before the November 1918 armistice secured a successful conclusion to the war for the Allies. Sadly, he celebrated that victory in a hospital, felled by poison gas, exhaustion, and perhaps the Spanish Flu. Returning home, he struggled to find work and support a growing family, but he also wrote a compelling memoir of his wartime experiences. Historian James Presley later discovered this manuscript by pure serendipity, and he edited and annotated it. Thanks to him, and to Charlie and his family, readers now have not just another story of a Texas doughboy in World War I, but also a useful perspective on the debate over tactics, open warfare versus trench warfare, that continues today.
Author Biography
James Presley has written nine previous books, including Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes, a collaboration with the Tennessee Evolution Trial defendant that was nominated for the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians; A Saga of Wealth: The Rise of the Texas Oilmen, anominee for the Pulitzer Prize in History; and The Phantom Killer, about a notorious Texas serial murder. A former newspaperman, Presley earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin. He has published numerous articles in academic and popular publications. He received the John H. McGinnis Memorial Award for "America's Black Novelists and the Nobel Prize," published in Southwest Review, and an Anson Jones Award from the Texas Medical Association for a series of articles on cancer.
