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Korea: The Remembered War
By Al Martinez, July-August 2003
As North Korea gets aggressive once again, a Marine revisits the battlegrounds of his youth
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The war in Korea wasn't a very noisy affair. Labeled a "police action," it was regarded as necessary but not glamorous. No battle hymns stirred America's soul, and when the conflict ended 50 years ago, it was with a whimper. But while no one was looking and few were listening, almost 3 million people perished in its quiet horror, and I came home with a wound on my soul that will never heal.
As a Marine Reservist, I left for war from a train station in San Francisco, with only a faint notion of what traumas lay ahead. There were no drums and bugles at our departure and none when we returned. Although it is known as "the forgotten war," those of us who were there remember it well. I remember the Kansas Line and Operation Killer and Hwachon and Yanggu and Hill 749. I remember the faces of men too young to vote dying in pain on the unforgiving valleys and mountains from Pusan to the Chosin Reservoir.
It was especially on my mind this spring, as North Korean armies goose-stepped across our television screens and North Korean leaders boasted of nuclear weapons. Given the war in Iraq and threats of terrorism at home, the anxiety that permeates Korea is just one more reason to view the future with alarm.
When I visited the peninsula three years ago, I saw that nature had forgiven us the war we fought there. Trees once shredded by artillery fire wear new garments of thick greenery. Towns flourish where villages were burned. Hwachon, just south of the demilitarized zone, is one of them. Elemental battles were fought here. I spent days and nights inching forward through these hills, witnessing the deaths of men I had known since boot camp. One died in my arms, staring silently into my face, an unanswered question in his eyes. I still grieve for him.
The laughter of children in paddle boats on the reservoir at Hwachon in 2000 was an uneasy contrast to my memories of fighting our way up hillsides and finding napalm-blackened enemy bodies on the crest. They were two worlds I couldn't connect, two separate places in time.
Using binoculars, I could pick out Hill 749, a peak hidden among a thousand trees. We struggled up its slopes at a terrible cost, hanging on through a hellish night of banzai attacks. During one brief silence between barrages, we heard a woman in the valley below, her cries trailing up to us like ribbons. A rifleman asked why she was crying, and a lieutenant replied, "She's just crying for everybody."
Seven forty-nine is in the north now, ground gained through blood and lost through boundary making. Everything ventured, nothing gained. But even though Korea remains divided, I was touched by the people of the south who had lived through the war and who thanked me, sometimes in tears, for helping to save their country. The young people of South Korea long to create their own destiny, without a U.S. presence (there are now 37,000 troops stationed there), and they march through the streets to make that known. I understand that. We are yesterday's glory, a blip in history, and it's a new generation's turn to guard the freedom we helped preserve for them so long ago.
In the end, that freedom is all one can savor among the harsh recollections of battle. I try not to think of the lives that ended on the bloody hillsides. I sweep the occasional nightmares from my mind and fill the days with activity. I emerged from the war unhurt, but it is never far away. I just keep trying to remember the gratitude I heard in 2000. I try to remember the green hills. I try to remember the children's laughter. And I try to forget that, with the world still on the brink of Armageddon, the horror could start all over again.
Al Martinez is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
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