Picking up where we left off in Korea

by David Grand
July 15, 2009

Hate to think it could come to that. But with North Korea once again saber rattling and threatening to "wipe out the U.S. imperialists once and for all," if U.N. member states stop its ships, that they suspect are transporting banned arms and weapons-related material.

Now, on one hand, that threat may be dismissed as nothing more than bluster and chest-thumping on the part of its deranged leader, Kim Jong 11. But on the other hand, it'd be naive to believe that smoldering "tinder box" couldn't possibly ever be ignited and turned into a nuclear war.

By way of background, It was 56 years ago in 1953 that the Korean War ended, with a truce rather than a peace agreement being signed at the village of Panmunjom.

It was one year earlier that I'd bid that war torn, divided country a farewell. And from the time I walked up the gangplank of the ship taking me back to civilization, I tried to block out from my mind (albeit not too successfully) the horrors and bloodshed I'd seen, and the suffering and the total deprivation the war had inflicted upon its people.

And to this day, I can still picture starving kids running alongside my tank begging for food, and with mothers and their children scouring through the garbage cans behind our mess tent for discarded scraps of food.

When I heard of the truce ending that "meat grinder" war, the first thought I had, was isn't it ironic that the signing ceremony took place near the 38th parallel where the war began, when the North Korean Communist army crossed into South Korea at dawn on June 25, 1950.

But the human toll that was paid in reaching that truce was staggering, what with U.S. losses placed at over 54,000 dead, and 103,000 wounded; while Chinese and Korean causalities were each at least 10 times higher. That's some carnage for a war (labeled as a "police action" by the U. N.) that lasted 37 months.

Now, while it's true that the war did establish that the United States was prepared to intervene militarily to stop the spread of communism (whenever and wherever), I'll leave it to the historians to judge whether that counterbalanced the loss of four million lives on both sides.

And it was in 2003 that I heard of North Korea once again stirring up the pot, by their working to enrich uranium and creating the facilities needed to do it. So much, I thought, for it pledging to adhere to the arms control arrangement it reached with the United States in 1994, in which it agreed not to produce plutonium; and, as a quid pro quo, Japan, South Korea and the U.S. agreeing to provide fuel oil and other economic aid. As they say, you can't buy love, or buy off pathological liars in the hope that they'll keep their promise to do, or not do, something.

Well, I guess all we can do is pray, that North Korea will come to the realization that for it to launch long-range ballistic missiles-with nuclear warheads- in our direction would be suicidal and result in their country becoming a nuclear wasteland.

A sane, rational mind would know that, but that's not what Kim Jong 11 is; ergo, we'd better brace ourselves for the worst-case scenario to happen. And if it doesn't, we can then breath a collective sigh of relief and wait for the next crisis to emerge in this crazy-quilt world.