Barry Talks! : Common Sense for Uncommon Times

Saturday, June 25, 2005

June 25th

(posted on NKZone as well)
On this day fifty-five years ago, the Korean People's Army swept out of the north and invaded the Republic of Korea, starting a horrific conflict in which Korea became a jousting field for the superpowers of the time: the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. Hundreds of thousands of troops were killed; millions of civilians died over three bloody years; and neither side can be said to have won, in the end.
For me this day has personal significance. Fifty-five years ago a young Marine Corps officer on his honeymoon was recalled to duty, postponing, as it happened, the conception of the couple's first child -- me -- until his return several years later.
Across the planet, the invasion caused another young woman to flee Seoul for the safety of Pusan on the south. So crowded were the trains that refugees climbed on top of the boxcars, only to be killed when the train sped through a tunnel. She, luckily, survived, and made it to Pusan. Later, after MacArthur landed at Inchon and pushed north, she returned to Seoul; only to flee again when the tide turned after three hundred thousand Chinese "volunteers" crossed the Yalu.
Forty years later I would marry her first daughter.
It is remarkable, isn't it, how we all unknowingly float in the wavelets of history?
A few years ago I wrote about this extraordinary time and its people, both great and ordinary, in both the United States and Korea, in Land of the Morning Storm. The history books talk about Kim Il-sung and Harry Truman and Mao Zedong, and the battles of great armies, and to be sure these are important things; but the consequences of their decisions rippled through millions, from the brother furiously fighting against brother to the young wife in Massachusetts worrying about her husband risking his life in a land neither of them had heard of fifty-five years and one day ago.
It is called the "Unknown War;" but its effects resound to this very day.

Comment (0) #