Unit Pride - Softcover

John McAleer, while a professor at Boston College, received a letter from Billy Dickson about a review McAleer had published. Dickson was serving time in Walpole State Penitentiary for bank robbery. McAleer encouraged Dickson to write about his Korean War experiences, and thus began a 1,200-letter correspondence between McAleer and Dickson that led to Dickson's writing the novel, Unit Pride. McAleer was also the author of eight other books, and a lifetime resident of Lexington, Massachusetts. He passed away in 2003.

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 is 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 being shot to death in a nearby thicket. In the best of times they staved off boredom and depression by befriending French Legionnaires and patronizing the local Korean 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.
John McAleer, while a professor at Boston College, received a letter from Billy Dickson, who was serving time in Walpole State Penitentiary for bank robbery. McAleer encouraged Dickson to write about his Korean War experiences, and thus began a 1,200-letter correspondence between McAleer and Dickson that developed into this novel.