Send Port & Pyjamas!Send Port & Pyjamas!, which is no longer in print, was published in 1987 by:
Buckland Publications Ltd
Chaucer House
Chaucer Business Park
Kemsing
Sevenoaks
Kent TN15 6PW
United Kingdom
Phone: +44-1732-763031
Fax: +44-1732-764242
Email:
publications buckland.co.uk
ISBN: 0-7212-0763-4
Used copies are available through Bookfinder.com and elsewhere.
"Send Port and Pyjamas!" was Dan Raschen's message when he was briefly detained in a 'MASH' in the Korean War. The bottle arrived but without a corkscrew!
As a young officer in the Royal Engineers, the author had volunteered for Korea because he hoped for some pheasant shooting. If his reasons for doing so were unusual, so is this an unusual war book.
By the time he joined the First (and only) Commonwealth Division in August 1951 the war front had moved down and up Korea twice, covering 1,000 miles, before settling once again much where it had started. When the Australians again advanced across the Imjin River, Dan was the Sapper officer who supported them. For a short while, due to an error in his map reading, he found he was leading the United Nations himself.
When he became a junior member of the intelligence staff, the author appreciated that the requirements for his duties might be made to coincide with those for pheasant shooting. Many thousands of anti-personnel mines had been laid to deter the Chinese and North Koreans, but were soon to prove a menace to our own troops. Dan checked the location of the minefields whilst carrying a shotgun, pheasants proved plentiful, and it wasn't long before senior officers were requesting his services as a shooting guide.
Dan was in Korea for half of the three year war, under circumstances as varied as were the nationalities supporting the United Nations campaign: booby traps with the Puerto Ricans were balanced by champagne with the French.
This is a light-hearted autobiography, which concentrates on the happier aspects of soldiering. The undertones, however, are serious, and these reminiscences make an interesting and wide ranging contribution to the history of the time.
Several quotations from the book are included in Anti-personnel Landmines: Friend or Foe? by Brigadier Patrick Blagden (March 1996, annexes revised August 1997). Published by the International Committee of the Red Cross, ISBN 2-88145-076-8 (2-88145-076 in the publication).
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