foot-soldiering on another lonely, dangerous road in the "forgotten war"
Korea today is still remembered in irony as “the forgotten war,” the three-year “police conflict” between the good democratic forces of the west and the evil communist forces of the east that transpired after the close of World War II and prior to the start of our complex policy unraveling in Viet Nam.
On June 25, 1950, sixty full years ago this morning, North Korea invaded South Korea, threatening to take over the western-organized democracy of South Korea and spreading the totalitarian dictates of the communist world upon another nation of free people. The long-story-short version of what happened next is that the United States and UN Allies got involved in an official “police action” that would thwart these ambitions and eventually draw the two nations into a peace agreement that would split the two nations at the 38th parallel for as long as that agreement could be defended.
The 1953 “cease fire” phase of this agreement still involves the US and international supervision some sixty years later. There never was a peace agreement, just an unholy cessation of conflict that could still flare up again today if the North Koreans ever think a blink on our side means weakness. In 2010, South Korea thrives as a western economy with an elevated standard of living while North Korea starves under the heavy hand of dictator Kim Jong Il and his failed communist economy. By no vote of the people, the North Koreans are a nation that can afford to pursue nuclear weapons, but one that also cannot feed or provide meaningful jobs for its population.
1950 now seems like a lifetime ago because, for me, it was. I remember the day the war broke out. The Houston Press covered the news in bold type headlines that scared the bejabbers out of all of us on the sandlot. Back then, we braced for the big atomic bomb war about as often as the newspapers could come up with another scary warning. And this was no warning. This was war.
At age 12, I was pretty much resigned to the idea that I was only about six years away from being there, or somewhere like Korea, by the time I reached 18. It didn’t happen in my case, but I simply missed the crisis points for being called later – and something else happened to get in the way.
When I tried to go into the army voluntarily through the ROTC in college, I twice failed the hearing exam when I went up for contract. That result was one of the strange disappointments of my early adult life. I wanted to serve in the military, but I was rejected for reasons of physical well-being. By the time I might have been called to Viet Nam, I was considered too old to be called into the infantry without a bill of perfect health. As a result, I became one of those still young Americans who wasn’t burning flags in protest to Viet Nam, but I wasn’t out there putting his life on the line in a foreign country either. Instead, I was home, down in the trenches with those working with gangs and the violently disturbed on the streets of New Orleans. It was a different kind of war. It just didn’t feel the same to me, but that’s not important at all beyond my own nose.
My point today is simple and it is important: Remember Korea. Remember all who have served in the military, especially those who still serve to this day in the mine fields of conflict that are Iraq and Afghanistan. If it were not for our brave younger people, none of us would be free to debate whether our borders are worth defending or not. And it wouldn’t matter one iota what Arizona is doing or not doing to either defend America or offend those who want to come here on their own without regard for our southern border.
Thank you especially, Korean vets. It’s about time America fully remembered and honored what you people did for the rest of back in the early ’50s.
Tags: History, Korean War
The Pecan Park Eagle 
June 28, 2010 at 6:31 pm |
Thanks, Bill. We call it the Forgotten Victory. You are right, South Korea is a thriving democracy thanks to the Korean War, while North Korea is a communist hell hole. I enlisted right out of high school for the minimal time (18 months) to “beat the draft”. Forgot to read the fine print and ended up getting called back when those Yankee Koreans (as the Texans called them) started the unpleasantness. Can it really be 60 years? Jack Benny and I are still 39. BK
July 2, 2010 at 3:38 am |
Yes, it is the Forgotten Victory, as South Korea can testify, but only a half-victory, given the UN hope to unite the Two Koreas.
As a high school Junior, I ‘knew’ the Draft would get me the day after graduation in June 1951.
It didn’t.
1953-1955 was my tour of duty as an “occupation troop”, and I did witness some effects of that war after the so-called truce:
two NCOs took their lives – one directly, the other indirectly;
the orphanage down the road was overflowing with children whose parents had died or disappeared;
teen sex workers proliferated in every village remotely close to a military unit; and
new villages grew up almost overnight around rice fields pitted with bomb and artillery craters.
Combat and I were strangers, but my introduction to the “survivors” and the social and economic results of that combat, as seen at the local level, were not.
Nonetheless, my 18-months as an “occupation troop” seriously changed my life over the next fifty-plus years.