Retired Col. Sam Holliday of Atlanta doesn’t remember many names of those who landed in Korea with him. They died too quickly.
He does remember the names of those who survived the first onslaught, only to die later. They lived long enough to make an impression.
But the Korean war, which ran from 1950 to 1953, made little impression on the rest of America, the 86-year-old said. The nation sent its forces off to fight and then forgot them. Many later did their best to forget about the war itself.
The reason can be found by looking at a map: The Korean peninsula is still divided, North Korea remains a last vestige of Stalin's brand of communism, and armed Americans and Koreans still face each other because the war ended with a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.
“It was partly successful in that it kept the south a free country, but 60 years later we still have troops there,” said another retired colonel, 82-year-old Bob Kessler of Stone Mountain. “It is unfinished business until we get things resolved with North Korea. I don’t know if that will ever be done.”
Holliday, as a young lieutenant, was one of the first soldiers sent to Korea after the American and South Korean forces were overrun by North Korean troops in a surprise attack starting on June 25, 1950.
He had been stationed on Okinawa with troops who weren't ready for battle, he said. Once President Harry Truman decided the peninsula was worth American blood, the green troops were ordered into combat.
It was a disaster.
Two battalions were cobbled together. They were promised a week's training in Japan.
Instead, while en route they were ordered to go directly to Pusan, which was on the southeast corner of Korea and was the last toehold of territory held by U.S. and South Korean forces, who were in danger of being pushed into the sea.
“We were set out to face two divisions of the North Koreans,” Holliday said. “In the first three days, half the people I went with were killed. Or they were captured, tortured and then killed."
The U.S. was activating National Guard divisions and reservists -- and unlike World War II, where fighters got a lot of training, they were going directly to the battlefield.
“These people were called to active duty and given almost no training," Kessler said. "They were like cannon fodder. That's not right."
Samuel Wells, a historian with the Woodrow Wilson International Center, said the war was initially popular in the U.S., at least after Gen. Douglas MacArthur had executed the amphibious landing at Inchon three months after the invasion. The much-heralded maneuver put United Nations and South Korean forces near Seoul, the enemy-held capital of South Korea, and behind the North Korean troops fighting in the south.
MacArthur then turned the tables on the North Koreans, pushing north past the 38th parallel, which served as a boundary between the two Koreas, toward the Yalu River on the Chinese border.
“MacArthur was telling people he would have troops back by early 1951, that he would have it wrapped up by Christmas," Wells said. "That obviously overlooked certain factors ... like 800,000 Chinese coming across the border in October 1950.”
Wiley Virden of Atlanta, then a master sergeant, said once the Americans were pushed out of the north, regrouped and fought back to the 38th parallel, the war became mired in two years of needless killing, with neither side gaining any ground, while negotiators haggled over terms for a cease-fire, which was signed July 27, 1953.
During the stalemate, Virden recalled, the Americans would occupy T-bone Hill each day, retreat and yield it and its trenches to the Chinese each night, then would retake the hill the next day. Finally, the order came that the ground was not to be yielded, resulting in a days-long battle and a Silver Star for gallantry for Virden.
The bombardment and frontal assaults were exceptionally ferocious. Virden said men were kneeling in the trenches in prayer. Others were firing their weapons. Others "bugged out," he said.
"We had 150 GIs entrenched, and I was one of the 23 who walked off after the battle," Virden said. "It was totally unnecessary, but that was the order. The land had no military value at all."
Today, the Korean conflict is considered a "forgotten" war by many, though there is the occasional remembrance, like an observance that was held Saturday in Duluth to honor veterans of the war.
Actually, Wells said, the Korean War did have a lasting impact on U.S. policy. It was during the conflict that Truman desegregated U.S. troops. It helped propel a military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower would later warn against. And Korea remains the one potential hot spot left over from the Cold War.
Holliday, who went on to serve in Vietnam and became a professor of international relations at the University of South Carolina after his Army retirement, said Korea provided a number of lessons for policymakers, but few paid attention. The nation itself, he said, largely tried to ignore the war once it ended. The two-year stalemate had soured many on the value of the conflict, he said.
"Americans were accustomed to having a victory and this was clearly not a victory," Holliday said. "It wasn’t a war to destroy the enemy forces. It was a war in which you gained control of a population, and that is a different kettle of fish. We’re not very good at that, as demonstrated in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. We have made the same mistakes all along.”
Virden, who mustered out of the army after his tour and went into insurance, said the war affects him to this day. On his first Independence Day after getting home, he found fireworks gave him the willies. They sounded too much like battle.
“I had to get out of there, I couldn’t handle it," he said. "To this day, I never go to the Fourth of July celebration.”
For more memories from Holliday, Kessler, Virden and other combat vets of the Korean War, listen to their recorded interviews at Witnesstowar.org.
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