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50th anniversary of ‘Forgotten War'

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June 25, 2000   

PANMUNJOM, Korea, (AP) - Fifty years after North Korea attacked the South, Korean War veterans gathered at former battlegrounds to remember the "Forgotten War" that lasted three years, cost millions of lives and left a small peninsula nation divided.

One American veteran brought the South Korean flag he saved from his days as a U.S. Marine in the early 1950s; another returned to the port city of Inchon where his flotilla launched the daring landing that would change the course of the 1950-53 war.

"I take exception to the ignominious label of 'Forgotten War,"' said retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Bill Thompson, who brought Navy veterans to South Korea for the 50th anniversary Sunday of the outbreak of the war. "It was a cornerstone in the fall of communism. It was the first time we stepped up to Stalin to stop his attempt at world domination."

But even as veterans revisited old battle sites and peered across the Military Demarcation Line to communist North Korea, celebrations for Sunday's anniversary were muted, with both Koreas seeking  small but symbolic ways to begin repairing five decades of enmity.

During last week's historic inter-Korea summit, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il announced that he had canceled war anniversary celebrations. The South canceled its military parade and battle reenactments as well earlier this week. 

Even at the truce village of Panmunjom along the world's most heavily fortified border, propaganda broadcasts that earlier pierced the quiet of the countryside have halted. 

And on the streets of Seoul, jubilation over signs of reconciliation overshadowed bitterness over the five-decade-old war.

Seoul's vendors hawked key chains and T-shirts featuring Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in the embrace that took the world by surprise. Department store mannequins were dressed in the Mao-inspired jackets that just years ago might have branded the designer a communist and landed her in jail. 

Fred Machado, a U.S. Navy veteran from Fresno, California, said simply returning for the first time since the Korean War, and seeing this once dusty, ravaged country transformed into a bustling, thriving democracy, was commemoration enough. 

"I remember Inchon being devastated - nothing there," Machado, 68, said Friday during a trip to Panmunjom. "I remember young children starving to death, begging. I used to fill my pockets with everything I could and give them to the kids."

Seoul, with its skyscrapers, luxury cars, restaurants and five-star hotels, looks nothing like Korea of war years past, he said. Other veterans crinkled their noses remember the stench of manure and the bitter cold of Korean winters.

"The Korean people are doing well, and that makes me feel good. We did the right thing," Machado said. 

"The men and women who died over here did not die in vain." As his tour bus rumbled past live minefields in the Demilitarized Zone, the 4-kilometer-wide (2. mile-wide) buffer zone that divides

North and South, retired U.S. marine Neal Mishik recalled his time serving as a radio operator in 1951-52.

The fields, tucked in among verdant rice paddies, reminded him of the day he learned, by relaying messages, that one of his friends had stepped on a live mine. "He went home the short way - the dead way," he said soberly. Looking out at one of two villages in the DMZ, the North's Gi Jong Dong, which U.S. soldiers call "Propaganda Village," Mishik waved at the jumble of buildings that rises through the haze like an abandoned Hollywood set - impressive but empty. 

"You see the village and the streetlights, but there are no people and no traffic over there," said Mishik, 69. "It's eerie."

Inside the conference room where the North and South hold general-level talks, Mishik craned his neck to see outside a window to where a North Korean soldier in olive green stood idly, his hands at his sides. 

"There's my good friend over there - he hasn't changed in 50 years," he said wryly. 

The South Korean soldiers, in contrast, stood on guard, arms akimbo in a teakwood stance, their eyes hidden by dark glasses. 

Across the way, tourists on the North Korea side, usually Russians and Chinese, snapped photographs of the visitors on the South's side.

Despite the placidity at Panmunjom and the recent warming of relations between the two Koreas, Thompson, 77, warned against forgetting that more than 36,000 Americans and more than 2 million Koreans were killed during the war.

"It's a realistic situation," he said, noting that the two sides signed an armistice in 1953 that did not technically end the war. "The war still isn't over."