The Graybeards - Korean War Veterans Association
The Graybeards - Korean War Veterans Association
The Graybeards - Korean War Veterans Association
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Remarks made at <strong>The</strong> Korea Society<br />
Commemorative Gala June 25, 1999 at<br />
George Washington University featuring<br />
Seoul’s Metropolitan Dance Team.<br />
Distinguished guests, fellow <strong>Korean</strong><br />
<strong>War</strong> veterans, ladies and gentlemen:<br />
I want to thank the members of the<br />
Korea Society for arranging this wonderful<br />
commemorative event to begin to<br />
put the <strong>Korean</strong> <strong>War</strong> into a clearer perspective<br />
for the American people.<br />
I am honored by the opportunity to<br />
speak to you tonight on behalf of the<br />
thousands of men and women from 20<br />
nations who beginning on this date 49<br />
years ago, joined with their comrades<br />
from South Korea and the United States<br />
in fighting and winning the United<br />
Nation’s historic first battle to stop and<br />
rollback totalitarian communist aggression<br />
against a free and democratic people.<br />
I have long been puzzled why historians,<br />
writers and the national media<br />
have given such an inordinate amount<br />
of extensive attention to the unsuccessful<br />
effort to save South Vietnam from a<br />
communist attack from the North; while<br />
consistently forgetting our successful<br />
effort to save South Korea from attack<br />
by communist North Korea.<br />
<strong>The</strong> hard, bloody 37 months of fighting<br />
in Korea has largely been ignored<br />
and it has unjustly been labeled “<strong>The</strong><br />
Forgotten <strong>War</strong>.”<br />
Well I’m here tonight to tell you that<br />
it has never been forgotten by those of<br />
us who served there. American presence<br />
in Korea didn’t begin with the war.<br />
United States troops first entered Korea<br />
on September 3, 1945 to enforce<br />
Japanese surrender and meet advancing<br />
Soviet troops at the 38th Parallel.<br />
Today, nearly 54 years later, 37,000<br />
U.S. soldiers remain near that same<br />
Parallel where the <strong>Korean</strong> <strong>War</strong> began<br />
on this date in 1950 and ended on July<br />
27, 1953.<br />
I remember what that geographic<br />
map line actually looks like on the<br />
ground. Because during the bitter cold<br />
winter of 1946 - shortly after my 17th<br />
birthday - I served as an infantry buck<br />
“<strong>Korean</strong> <strong>War</strong> For Freedom”<br />
“<strong>The</strong> <strong>Korean</strong> <strong>War</strong> was a clean-cut victory for the United States and the United<br />
Nations. It stopped a major communist lunge southward, and may well have saved<br />
Japan from being engulfed.” And it made possible today’s modern South Korea.<br />
Oxford History of the American People<br />
private rifleman on the 38th Parallel at<br />
the <strong>Korean</strong> town of Kaesong. And for<br />
the next two years I spent my days and<br />
nights pulling outpost guard and patrol<br />
duties along that dividing line between<br />
North and South Korea, sometimes<br />
exchanging fire with Russians and<br />
North <strong>Korean</strong>s. And ironically, later<br />
during the war, it was in that same<br />
rugged area that I climbed out of a<br />
sandbag bunker and left Korea in 1952.<br />
<strong>The</strong> last prewar U.S. occupation<br />
division was withdrawn to Japan in<br />
1949. My enlistment was up and I<br />
returned to the states to enter college<br />
under the GI Bill. Like other World <strong>War</strong><br />
II veterans, upon discharge, I was<br />
assigned to the Army’s inactive reserve<br />
list. Few of us expected to ever have to<br />
serve again.<br />
Imagine my shock, when in July<br />
1950 shortly after President Truman<br />
unilaterally ordered U.S. forces back<br />
into South Korea to meet the surprise<br />
North <strong>Korean</strong> attack, I was recalled to<br />
active duty. So instead of finishing my<br />
summer college course and enrolling<br />
for the fall semester, I like thousands of<br />
other hastily recalled Army Marine, Air<br />
Force and Navy reservists got out the<br />
old, stored-away uniform, said my<br />
good-byes, and headed back to camp<br />
and the troop ships waiting in<br />
California. No one went to Canada.<br />
America’s citizen soldiers would<br />
fight the <strong>Korean</strong> <strong>War</strong>. This sudden<br />
involuntary recall of thousands of civilian<br />
inactive military reservists -most of<br />
whom were decorated World <strong>War</strong> II veterans<br />
only four short years away from<br />
long dangerous service in that war and<br />
just getting education, jobs and families<br />
started - is perhaps one of the most<br />
poignant untold stories of the <strong>Korean</strong><br />
<strong>War</strong>. With little or no refresher military<br />
training, many were rushed pell-mell<br />
into battle as individual replacements to<br />
depleted American units desperately<br />
fighting for their lives in the Pusan<br />
Perimeter. <strong>The</strong>y called themselves<br />
“retreads”. And they went on to storm<br />
ashore at Inchon, defeated the North<br />
<strong>Korean</strong> Army, then with South <strong>Korean</strong><br />
and UN Allies fighting off the sudden<br />
attack of overwhelming Chinese forces<br />
in the subzero weather in North Korea,<br />
shoot the MiGs out of MiG Alley, save<br />
the Hungnam beachhead, and ultimately<br />
preserve South Korea’s freedom<br />
in the battles of the “Iron Triangle,” on<br />
“Heartbreak Ridge” and “Pork Chop<br />
Hill”. Sadly, a great many of these<br />
brave citizen soldiers did not survive<br />
their second war. Freedom had a high<br />
cost in lives.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y, and thousands of hurriedly<br />
called-up and hastily trained teenage<br />
draftees and National Guardsmen,<br />
along with young UN soldiers, became<br />
part of the 54,246 killed, 103,284<br />
wounded and 8,177 still missing in<br />
action from three years of bloody fighting.<br />
And for those of us that did survive,<br />
it was return home after another<br />
year or two away at war, store away the<br />
uniform, and once more start looking<br />
for a job, or to get back into school to<br />
start over trying – as some had been<br />
since 1946 – to get lives and new families<br />
together. No official welcomes. No<br />
parades. America took little notice of<br />
our going or our return. <strong>The</strong> war was<br />
quickly forgotten by all but ourselves,<br />
and our families.<br />
As the years have passed I, and I’m<br />
sure many of my comrades, have often<br />
wondered just what did our service and<br />
sacrifice achieve? Perhaps Samuel Eliot<br />
Morrison best summed up the outcome<br />
of the <strong>Korean</strong> <strong>War</strong> in this passage from<br />
the 1965 edition of the Oxford History<br />
of the American People: “<strong>The</strong> <strong>Korean</strong><br />
<strong>War</strong> was a clean-cut victory for the<br />
United States and the United Nations. It<br />
stopped a major communist lunge<br />
southward, and may well have saved<br />
Japan from being engulfed.” And it<br />
Page 44<br />
<strong>The</strong> <strong>Graybeards</strong>