The Graybeards - Korean War Veterans Association

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