Seoul did not seem to provide many answers at first. South Korea’s capital is a bustling, sprawling, neon-lit metropolis striving to get ahead in the world. It does not display its battle scars. People there do not spend time dwelling on a war that took place before many of them were born. It took a visit to Seoul’s War Museum to recall the violence of the conflict and the lives lost at such aptly named places as Heartbreak Ridge, Bloody Ridge and Massacre Valley. Poster-size photographs depict horror and suffering: the frozen corpses of U.S. Marines killed at the Choson Reservoir, lines of panic-stricken refugees, half-starved war orphans.
The museum’s meticulously compiled books of remembrance list the names of every one of the 33,870 American servicemen killed in the Korean War. On consecutive pages, I found two men I had known well, and whose deaths had always saddened me. One was a classmate from Officer Training School. Although he was an only son and was enrolled in graduate school, he had been called up and sent to Korea anyway. There were no easy deferments in those days. He had been afraid of going into combat. But he had accepted it, and he won the Silver Star twice before dying on a Korean hilltop in May 1951. The other name was that of a 19-year-old corporal in my own platoon. He, too, died in an assault on a hill. He was about 15 feet away from me when an enemy grenade landed nearby. At first I had not realized how badly wounded he was. But when I passed him a while later he looked at me with unforgettable anguish and said: “I’m dying, Lieutenant.” There was no way to save him. Later I wrote his parents. He, too, was an only son. I told them he died instantly and felt no pain.
I wanted to find some South Koreans who had fought in the war. Kim Chong Un, a former ROK (Republic of Korea) Army officer who now teaches English and American literature at Seoul National University, was the sort of person I was looking for. Kim had been a KATUSA–a Korean attached to a U.S. Army unit. His outfit had been the Second Infantry Division, which saw much heavy combat. “It was the most traumatic experience of my entire life,” Kim told me. “I still have nightmares, 40 years later.” I did not press him for details. I didn’t need to. I knew what he meant.
Other South Koreans told me curious things. Na Chong Il, dean of the Graduate School at Seoul’s Kyung Hee University, spoke of a conference he had organized in May to promote “reconciliation and understanding” among veterans of the war. The participants included a retired U.S. Air Force general, a former Soviet colonel who claimed to have shot down 14 American planes over North Korea and a former North Korean POW who now manages a golf course in Seoul and has a son studying biology in the United States. “We achieved good reconciliation–we got on well together,” says Na Chong Il. “But we were less successful with understanding. After [talking] for three days, the participants couldn’t understand why they had fought each other so hard 40 years ago.”
That was fine, but what I really wanted to find was hills–if possible, the ones where we actually fought. I started out by car from Seoul and headed toward Inje, a town on the eastern side of the peninsula. Hills of the sort I remembered began just outside Seoul. They looked greener and more heavily wooded than I recalled, but otherwise just as I remembered them: steep, massive and very forbidding. Did we actually struggle up those hills with packs on our backs and heavy weapons on our shoulders and live in holes in the ground, like animals? And then fight and die up there? Good Lord.
Heavy price: Finally we came to a remote village called Yanggu, surrounded by ridge lines and mountains that seemed even steeper and more desolate. In early June 1951, various rifle companies of the Fifth Marine Regiment, my own included, had clawed and fought their way along these same ridgelines in pursuit of Chinese and North Korean troops that were falling back slowly–but exacting a heavy price all the way. The car wound its way up over a twisting dirt road. We stopped in a pass at the top of the ridge. Thirty nine years earlier, almost to the day, my company assaulted the enemy-held hill looming above the road. It was an all-day struggle. Casualties were heavy.
So here I was at last. Had it been worth it? I had gone quite willingly to Korea, back then. It was only a few years after the end of World War II, and patriotism was a value that few questioned. We felt we were doing our duty. More than that, we were Marines. Wasn’t that explanation enough?
I believed then that we were right to hold the line against communist aggression in Korea, and I still do. Revisionism is not for me. The tactics, at least those followed by the Marines, were sound. Controlling the high ground is one of the basic laws of warfare, and that’s why we had to climb all those hills. But it was awful. Thank God I will never have to do it again.
