One Came Home

Vincent A. Krepps
American Literary Press (2007)
ISBN 9781561679881
Reviewed by Dr. Michael Philliber for Reader Views (2/08)


Sadness abounds around war on many levels, and personal stories of war can be the hardest to handle. Vincent A. Krepps, in “One Came Home,” tells his own individual story of the Korean War, but the pain of his tale is deeper due to the loss of his twin brother in that conflict. One of the reasons the author has written this book is to inform a generation of people who have generally forgotten the Korean War about what went on and how it affected people, specifically himself and his family.

The story behind this book is of two, small-town, Pennsylvania twin boys who played, slept, ate and lived together for 19 years. This togetherness splashed over into their early adulthood years when they enlisted in the Army together, went through basic training, tank and anti-aircraft training, and finally to Korea together. This is a story about Vincent and Richard Krepps, their involvement in the Korean War, the loss of Richard as an MIA/POW, and Vincent’s search for a resolution to Richard’s status.

The reader who picks up this rather large book will quickly find that it is not written as a disinterested historical rendition of the Korean War. They will find they are sitting down with an old friend who is simply telling his story, peppered with all the grief, self-doubts, frustration, and guilt one would expect. Therefore, the story sometimes seems a bit disjointed in the personal retelling. Only around one third of the book is concerned with Vincent’s and Richard’s story, the rest of the book is chock-full of documentation from Vincent’s search for information about his brother, as well as information about the attempts to recover the remains of other service members from that war, the records of the North Korean POW camps, and the repatriation of POWs. The resolution of Vincent’s search for what really happened to his twin brother comes in chapters 20 and 26.

“One Came Home” is the size of a college textbook, with hardback, glossy cover, and printed on sturdy paper. It appears that the book is meant to be a durable rehearsal of story, information, documentation, and help for those wanting to dig deeper into the search for MIA/POWs, not only from the Korean War, but other conflicts as well. This is a book the reader will be glad to hold on to for years to come.

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