For all us W.E.B. Griffin freaks this tells the real story from Under Fire and the brave men that caputured the islands. A must read for miltary history buffs.

When Kuraku-san -- Eugene Clark -- died in 1998, no one except his family noticed his passing. Half a century earlier, Clark had prevented thousands of men, women and children from being murdered, and, indirectly, forestalled the deaths of millions more from murder and starvation.
He was a war criminal.
At least, by the standards of the self-appointed moral censors at Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Code PINK and the editorial boards of the New York Times and similar papers, he was.
He set up a secret prison where he kept civilians taken prisoner without access to the Red Cross or lawyers. He turned over prisoners to a government that was known to torture and kill prisoners. He shot soldiers who had laid down their arms. He recruited and used a child soldier only 13 years old.
You can decide for yourself the fitness of his behavior. He wrote it down for his superiors in the United States Navy in 1953. After they read it, it was put in a safety deposit box where it stayed, unknown to the world,
for 50 years.
Clark, who spoke Japanese, was chosen to head a commando mission in September 1950 to gather information about the notoriously difficult approaches to Inchon, the port of Seoul. The anticommunist armies were on the ropes in southeastern South Korea, fighting desperately to keep from being pushed into the sea. A few weeks earlier, at an insignificant place called No Gun Ri, a minor skirmish had been fought by retreating Americans. That action has since been elevated into another war crime, as a result of a phony story published by the Associated Press.
Kuraku-san, two South Korean lieutenants and a dozen South Korean marines occupied an island, Yonghung, on the approaches to Inchon and recruited local fishermen and farmers to collect intelligence. It involved nightly skirmishes, knifings, stealthy patrols and the last battle in history of fleets under sail.
Torture and murder of prisoners was frequent on both sides, although Lt. Kim, Clark's interrogator, preferred not to use it. Kim also usually failed to get any information from communist prisoners.
There are other kinds of torture besides waterboarding.
The key figure in the story, from out 21st century perspective, was Yeh, a Korean communist from the Inchon area. Yeh's father had been killed as a communist by the South Korean police. His mother, however, was an anticommunist.
After the war began, Yeh emerged as political officer for the North Koreans at Inchon. He was in a position to
use a unique kind of torture.
Yeh's grandfather, an elder on one of the islands, came to Yeh with the other elders to ask the communists to
leave them enough rice to survive; they were starving. Yeh was able to break down his grandfather by telling
him that he, Yeh, had killed the grandfather's daughter, Yeh's mother.
That broke the islanders. The elders were shot; the people fled to the hills to starve.
Clark staged a raid to capture Yeh. To Clark's frustration, Yeh was captured alive but shot (probably by accident by his own men) during a gun battle during the retreat.
Clark leaves no doubt that he did not expect Kim's restrained methods to work on a character like Yeh. He does not specify what torture he planned to use on Yeh, but he clearly intended to make him talk.
Clark commented many times on the difference between American and Oriental, especially Korean, rules. When he agreed to send a 13-year-old girl behind communist lines to spy, he labeled it "a pretty low business."
Early on, he defined the rules of engagement: "The Republic of Korea was waging 'total' war against the Reds, admitting of no compromise -- utterly ruthless in her determination to expel the enemy and bring the nation together again under one flag. Korea was fighting this war under Oriental rules, with no pretense of observing the fast-becoming outmoded 'humanitarian' laws of warfare established by Western conventions. No squeamish American could hope to obtain the respect or following of such ardent Korean revolutionaries (against first the Japanese, later the communists) as Yong and Kim," his Korean lieutenants.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Clark's foresight was justified.
In those days, conduct that the University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds has dubbed "lawfare" did not prevent anti-totalitarians like Clark from fighting on terms that made victory possible.
Clark's work made a success of the landing at Inchon. The result was not a complete victory for freedom, but as we now know, it saved tens of millions of South Koreans from slavery and death. Of the villagers who worked with Clark, about 50 were murdered in cold blood by the communists.
Lawfare was not in vogue in 1950. Clark was awarded a Silver Star and a Legion of Merit for his valor and skill. The recognition was inadequate, but Clark fought for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who begrudged giving credit to anybody but Douglas MacArthur, and especially not to a mustang like Clark.

I actually felt it was between 3 and 4 stars. I knew of this misson but never knew the details until now. I would personally like to thank Mrs. Clark for volunteering her husband's personal account of the misson which was in a safe-deposit box, unbeknown to the outside world.

It was amazing how one Navy officer and two Korean oficers had to get everything together and ready for the invasion of Inchon. Would you believe they had only two weeks to complete the task. One just does not know how many details and how many bumps there were until they read this book. I really enjoyed the descriptions and details. I feel I have gotten to understand the Korean people better because of this book. I fellt like I was there. A job well done!