Charles Hughes

Husband, father, grandfather, Professor Emeritus, gardener and yard man. Charles Hughes Biographical Sketch When the first wounded Marines arrived from Korea in the fall of 1950, Charles Hughes was a Navy hospital corpsman working on the wards at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. He was gripped by the stories those young men told. Too young for World War II and having missed that opportunity, Hughes now discovered in himself a strong desire to escape routine ward duties and travel to the country whose existence he had just recently learned about and find out what combat is really like. He and his friend Ollie Langston decided to volunteer for the Fleet Marine Force. Just days after they submitted their request they found themselves undergoing combat training at Camp Pendleton, the Marine base at Oceanside, California. Their desire to see what combat was like was more than satisfied in the months that followed. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Hughes dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen and joined the U.S Navy in 1948 and served for four years. Today he is professor emeritus of English at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. He graduated with a BA in political science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1957 and for the next nine years worked in communication intelligence for the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and later the Air Force Security Service as a cryptanalyst (Russian), instructor of cryptanalysis, technical writer (cryptanalysis), technical editor, and finally as the Chief of the Editing and Publications Branch of the USAFSS School at Goodfellow AFB, San Angelo, Texas. Hughes left that position in 1966 to attend graduate school at Texas Tech University at Lubbock where he received an MA (1968) and a PhD (1971) in literature and linguistics after which he was hired by Henderson State where he taught up to and after his retirement in 1996, serving for five of those years as Chairman of the English and Foreign Languages Department. Since his retirement Hughes has devoted his time to his family, to reading, gardening, and travel, and also to writing. At a time when North Korea dramatically burst into the news once more as a belligerent nuclear power Hughes 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 i