Opaque Lucidity

Forgotten War, Silent Men

I just finished David Halberstam's 'The Coldest Winter', a book which details the first year of the Korean War. If you know the history of that war, you know that 1950-51 was a crucial time. What's so heartbreaking is that you probably don't know anything about the war other than the fact it was fought.

I was in high school when the movement began to honor the veterans of Vietnam who had been ignored or ridiculed for so long. There were parades, newspaper articles and motorcycle rides, all in honor of the men who fought and died in Southeast Asia. My dad watched almost all of this in silence, only to say to me one day, 'What about the Korean War?"

Dad joined the Navy in January, 1952 and was off the coast of Korea by May of that year. The war had slowed into a World War One-like stalemate centered around the 38th parallel by then, but there was still plenty of work for the small destroyer on which dad served. His ship shelled North Korean rail facilities, picked up wounded Marines and traded fire with North Korean gun emplacements at the mouth of Wonsan Harbor. He was on his way back to Korea on another deployment in July, 1953 when the war ended.

The beginning of the Korean War found the United States in almost no condition to fight even a regional war. The nation that had finished the Second World War with the strongest military in the history of man had allowed that military to atrophy to a shadow of its former self in just five short years. The introduction of nuclear weapons in 1945 changed the public's perception of war to such an extent that many Americans believed the next war, if it was fought, would spell the end of civilization and would be fought in the air, not on the harsh terrain of the Korean peninsula.

The terrible habit we Americans have always had is to forget the lessons learned the hard way on the battlefield. Even though Korea was a very different war than what the US would face in Vietnam 15 years later, the two conflagrations had many things in common. In both cases, the enemy was not responsible to a nation's citizenry. There were no elections in Hanoi or Pyongyang for the politicians to worry about, unlike the elections in the US in 1950 and 1952. The American public does not like mounting casualties in any war, and so they vote accordingly. The Chinese fighting UN forces in Korea suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, yet they fought on with little regard for what had been lost.

The Korean War never officially ended. The truce that stopped the war has held for 55 years, but Korea remains the same divided place it was in 1950. The 1950's American public did not understand the concept of limited war or negotiated peace. After all, this was the nation that had pulverized another group of Asians and had dictated the terms of surrender at the point of a gun. To many, it seemed like the war in Korea was called at halftime for lack of interest.

Dad said one time that many people he knew back home during the war knew nothing about it even as it was occurring. Despite the fact that almost as many Americans died in Korea as would die in Vietnam has done little to change the seeming indifference that still lingers in the annals of our history. But something that bothers me more than the lack of honor shown the aging vets of a long-ago war is the loss of the lessons learned there. We are learning those lessons again today in Iraq and Afghanistan at the cost of thousands of American lives. How many lives could have been saved by the liberal use of military history? We'll never know, because it has never been tried. And we are a poorer nation because of it.