At the 50th anniversary of the Korean War’s start, I can but reflect on how much the war impacted my life and how it turned radically America’s perspective on international affairs.

Tuesday, July 04, 2000

At the 50th anniversary of the Korean War’s start, I can but reflect on how much the war impacted my life and how it turned radically America’s perspective on international affairs. With the Korean War, U.S. politicians pushed the American armed forces onto a slippery slope that bottomed out in Vietnam.

Throughout World War II, I eagerly awaited my 17th birthday when I could enlist in the Navy and "save the world for democracy." My older contemporaries served honorably and some heroically, and they became my heroes. The fighting ended before I reached the decisive birthday, but I was sworn into the Navy when the recruiting office opened that morning. So eager was I to serve my country, I squeezed in a few months prior to the official ending of "the duration" and had to start putting postage stamps on my mail. Much of that youthful euphoria survived to June 1950 when I was midway in my undergraduate studies and a member of the Naval Reserve. My classmates with combat experience were called up, but the Navy had no need for someone as inexperienced as I.

I completed college and was promptly drafted into the Army and sent to Fort Riley, Kan., as the basic training stop on the way to Frozen Chosen. Our training officers were recent ROTC graduates my age and equally naive about the political realities of this war. They lectured in TIPs (Troop Information Program) about the glorious challenge of war and the honor of dying for our country. They laid it on awfully heavy, and I became suspicious.

The murmuring from the rear of the classroom by our training NCOs stirred my curiosity. They had served in Korea for two years, and I felt might have gained another perspective. They wouldn’t answer my questions following these sessions, but I caught a few off guard in other contexts. Theirs was not only another perspective, but a substantially different one. They described the patriotic fervor they sustained when deployed and acknowledged the bitter disillusionment that hit them in the face once on the line.

At great cost of lives, they took a critical hill only to be ordered to pull back and surrender it to the enemy who then fired on them from its advantage point. Intelligence officers detected weak points in the enemy line and plans were formed to exploit it, and then the order came from higher headquarters to hold their present position. They followed orders and watched North Koreans move into the weak spot and occupy it. Only then were the Americans ordered to attack, but not advance. More lives were lost, equally without gain. They all had these stories, and they all ended with "What a waste!" or "What’s the use?" I began to wonder if this war was worth fighting.

Then I learned the MP Officer Candidate School to which I was committed closed and I would be sent to infantry and then I learned we would sit around Fort Riley until there was an opening and that all this would extend our service commitment into what was slouching into an eternity. The post theater even showed "From Here to Eternity." In effect, I opted out of the war.

I drew upon Navy training, civilian experience as an investigator, and college graduation and got myself into counterintelligence and a comfortable and safe job teaching psychology and speech at the Adjutant General’s School at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Ind. I did have the good sense, however, not to accept transfer to my hometown, where I would have learned and experienced even less.

Now having access to official documents and private conversations with senior officers, I learned how much military wisdom had been sacrificed to political fears. "They" were afraid communist China would enter the war, which it did anyway. "They" feared this would force American troops into ground war in mainland China, which would be over-commitment. "They" were scared of what the Soviet Union might do, which it did anyway without our being certain of it at the time.

That is to say, unlike the "unconditional surrender" demanded and won from Italy, German, and then Japan, American politicians were allowing little North Korea to set the conditions and surrendering American power to political fears. The American armed forces were being pushed around like pawns on a peninsular chess board. It was all right that the pawns were being picked off one by one as long as the king and queen weren’t actually taken off the board.

This was not like WWII we had all grown up admiring. So we served our time and got out. A typical self-assessment among us was, "I just figure this two years out of my life and then I’ll start living again."

We never ended the war and we certainly didn’t win it. We just stopped fighting and began to talk aimlessly for decades. Civilian politicians never learned their lesson in Korea and, so, greased the slope to greater loss of lives and more dismal failure in Vietnam.

Yet, I am proud I served but wish I had served more productively. I honor now those who gave their lives and those others who laid their lives on the line I then felt disgusted into avoiding.

Wallace Alcorn’s column appears Mondays