Long-lost Marine from Lehighton lives on in letters from Korean War about death, cold, rain, rats...

The memory of Marvin Nothstein survives in a sheaf of letters, a couple of Christmas cards, a handful of photos. They tell the story of a reluctant but dutiful Marine, drafted into the Korean War and longing, as the days wore on, for little more than a decent pair of socks and a ticket home.

Pfc. Nothstein — Company E, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, 1st Marine Division — was no romanticizer. He didn’t pretend war was anything but war. In letters only recently rediscovered by his family, he writes bluntly of front-line misery: death, cold, rain, hunger, filth, rats.

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On Memorial Day weekend, the letters are a stark reminder that in every conflict, the nation’s soldiers and sailors endure conditions beyond imagining for most of us, and many of them never know a moment of comfort again.

“This is a hell hole of a country over here,” Nothstein, a 22-year-old Lehighton native, told his father, Earl, and stepmother, May, in a letter dated Oct. 15, 1952. “When my time is up over here, I’ll have enough of this Marine Corp to last me for a long time.