Books are available
• A Fortune Teller's Blessing
• Accordion War

Autographed copies can be obtained post-paid from the author by sending a check or money order for $22 for one or $40 for two (either or both books) to:

Charles Hughes
2303 Elaine St.
Arkadelphia, AR 71923
(870) 246 8557 dochughesbooks@gmail.com; riflemandoc@yahoo.com

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Fortune Teller’s Blessing
Kindle $9.99

Accordion War
Kindle $9.99

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A Fortune Teller’s Blessing

During the depths of the Great Depression a handsome and gifted seventeen-year-old high school athlete saw his future shattered when his neck was broken in a football game. Few at the time thought the honor student, Eagle Scout, editor of his school paper, and president of his class every year since the seventh grade would survive. But John Allen Adams, son of a carnival fortune teller, did survive and was able to adapt to his severe handicap and go on to lead a remarkably successful life. Though left a quadriplegic, he proved to be a man of extraordinary inner resources, one who found freedom while bound to a wheelchair and independence while almost totally dependent on those around him.

Woven from important strands of Arkansas and American history, his story reaches far beyond his small hometown, but his family’s dramatic and distinguished past cannot account for the strength and amazing spiritual gifts of the man who inspired love from so many people. John Allen Adams was a skilled poet and a courageous worker for world peace, a man who triumphed over tragedy by finding within himself the resources to build a life that made a difference, a difference reflected in the testimonies and memories of those whose lives he touched.

Accordion War: Korea 1951—Life and Death in a Marine Rifle Company

At a time when North Korea has dramatically burst into the news once more as a belligerent nuclear power, Charles Hughes has published a historical memoir of his experiences as a hospital corpsman in a Marine rifle company during the Korean War. Accordion War: Korea 1951-Life and Death in a Marine Rifle Company is a detailed personal account of combat in the Korean War during its most violent “blitzkrieg” phase, the first third of the three-year war. While the descriptions of battles are up close and graphic, the conflict is also viewed from the perspective of the 21st century, from a keen awareness of the wars since—Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terror. Interwoven into the narrative is a meditation on life, death and war—on the question of why men spend so much treasure and blood fighting one another.

Hughes’ experiences came six years after those of another corpsman, Jack “Doc” Bradley, whose story was depicted recently in a best-selling book and popular movie, Flags of Our Fathers, which tell the story of the five Marines and one corpsman who were immortalized in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi during the battle for Iwo Jima. But the men in Korea who fought in what the historian Clay Blair called a war, “often surpassing the toughest battles of any war in American history,” would not be so remembered. Theirs was a conflict destined to be known as “The Forgotten War.”

A memorial honoring Hughes’ rifle company, H Company, Third Battalion, Seventh Regiment, 1st Marine Division was dedicated at the Marine base at Quantico on the campus of the Marine Corps University in 2006 and can be viewed at
http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=3147