Korea: the Post-war War

Abstract

Americans like wars with nicknames. The Spanish-American War (recently re-named Spanish-American-Cuban War, and by the more meticulous, Spanish-American-Cuban-Philippine War) was the 'splendid little' war; World War One, here in the U.S. and abroad, was 'great', World War Two was 'good', the Vietnam war was 'bad' and the Korean War 'forgotten'. Falling between the good war and the bad, ending neither in the total victory of the former nor the total defeat of the latter, the Korean War was an anomaly which historians, politicians and the public seem to have long thought best left out altogether, as the cartoonist Danzinger, perhaps unconsciously, did in his 1990 Thanksgiving Day cartoon in the Christian Science Monitor. Soldiers of past wars, from the Revolution through to the Gulf, sit down to share a turkey dinner, each dressed in the combat outfit of his particular era. But no veteran of the Korean War seems to have been invited to the feast.1 One would think that for a war to be forgotten it has to have taken place in the far past. What is odd about Korea is that even as it was being fought, it was deemed forgotten. How is it that the most unpopular war in UnitedStates history seems to have had so little impact on the country at the time and thereafter?2 The vivid presence of the Vietnam war even now, almost three decades after its conclusion, is usually attributed to that war's exceptional character: the brutality with which it was fought, the high rate of casualties, the impossibility of distinguishing friend from foe among the Vietnamese, indeed, the uncertainty about what would constitute victory. 'Vietnam', Lance Morrow intoned in Time magazine in 1980, 'was different from other wars ... There were no front lines. Reality tended to melt into layers of unknowability'.3 These factors, along with a glancing nod at the alleged power of television, are offered in explanation of national division,