Ranger

A Soldier's Life

Ralph Puckett, D.K.R. Crosswell

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813169330
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

On November 25, 1950, during one of the toughest battles of the Korean War, the US Eighth Army Ranger Company seized and held the strategically important Hill 205 overlooking the Chongchon River. Separated by more than a mile from the nearest friendly unit, fifty-one soldiers fought several hundred Chinese attackers. Their commander, Lieutenant Ralph Puckett, was wounded three times before he was evacuated. For his actions, he received the country's second-highest award for courage on the battlefield—the Distinguished Service Cross—and resumed active duty later that year as a living legend.

In this inspiring autobiography, Colonel Ralph Puckett recounts his extraordinary experiences on and off the battlefield. After he returned from Korea, Puckett joined the newly established US Army Ranger Department, serving as an instructor and tactical officer, and commanding companies at Fort Benning and in the Ranger Mountain Camp in north Georgia. He went on to lead companies in Vietnam, train cadets at West Point, and organize the Escuela de Lancero leadership course in Colombia. Puckett's story is critical reading for soldiers, leaders, military historians, and others interested in the impact of conflict on individual soldiers as well as the military as a whole.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Georgia Boy: Early Influences
• 2. Want to Be a Flyboy: Training with the U.S. Army Air Corps Enlisted Reserve
• 3. A Soldier’s Apprenticeship: West Point, Fort Riley, Kansas, and Fort Benning, Georgia
• 4. Korea: Eighth Army Ranger Company
• 5. Back on Track: Convalescence, Marriage, and the Ranger Department
• 6. Latin Sojourn: U.S. Army Caribbean Command and Forming the Colombian Ranger School
• 7. Climbing the Army School Ladder: Infantry Advanced Course, USMAPS, and the Command and General Staff College
• 8. Tenth Special Forces Group: Three-Year Idyll in Bavaria
• 9. Three More Way Stations Cleared: Armed Forces Staff College, the Pentagon, and U.S. Army War College
• 10. Strike Force: Battalion Command in Vietnam
• 11. Tet: The Unexpected Crossover
• 12. West Point: Changing Times at the Academy
• 13. The Fort Carson Blues: Troubled Birth of the New Army
• 14. Life in Mufti: Outward Bound, Discovery, and MicroBilt
• 15. Not All Old Soldiers Fade Away: Fort Benning Redux
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Index