The Korean War: A History (11 page)

Ever since 1950 this civil war analogy has been like a Rumpelstiltskin for the official American view that Kim committed international aggression: say it and the logic collapses, the interpretation loses its power. But Stokes carried his argument one step further:
not just a civil war, but a war between two conflicting social and economic systems.

Stokes happened to have been right: the longevity of this conflict finds its reason in the essential nature of the war, the thing we need to know first: it was a civil war, a war fought primarily by Koreans from conflicting social systems, for Korean goals. It did not last three years, but had a beginning in 1932, and has never ended. In the early 1970s, when the Vietnam War was clearly lost, even an anti-Communist scholar such as Adam Ulam (who in the 1990s called Korea “Stalin’s war”) could reflect that the North’s attack across the 38th parallel was no different than Mao’s legions crossing the Yangtze River into south China,
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and we can add Hanoi’s regular armies roaring out of the central highlands in 1975: the civil wars in China and Vietnam ended with infantry invasions—and Korea would have, too, if we think of June 1950 as an end to decades of intra-Korean conflict, a dénouement instead of a beginning.

For Americans a discrete encapsulation limits this war to the time frame of June 1950 to July 1953. This construction relegates all that went before to mere prehistory, June 25 is original sin, all that comes after is postbellum. It also presumes to demarcate the period of active American involvement; before June 1950, it is Syngman Rhee against Kim Il Sung backed or controlled by Stalin and/or Mao; after July 1953, it is Rhee against the same people, his fledgling republic ever under threat. This construction focuses the bright glare of our attention on the question of who started the war, on the presupposition that the correct answer to this question furnishes answers to all the other questions. What is highlighted here obscures all that went before and all that came after, placing it in the shadows of irrelevance. In this manner a wrongly conceived and never-known civil conflict disappears before our very eyes, as an American construction that only an American would believe; but American amour propre remains firmly intact. The American focus on “who started it” is a political and often an ideological position, a
point of honor that abstracts from and makes easy and comprehensible the politically shaped verdicts that began with Washington’s official story on June 25, 1950.

The Korean War was (and is) a civil war; only this conception can account for the 100,000 lives lost in the South
before
June 1950 and the continuity of the conflict down to the present, in spite of assumptions that Moscow’s puppets in Pyongyang would surely collapse after the USSR itself met oblivion in 1991. It is therefore instructive to see what Thucydides, the first philosopher of war, had to say about fratricidal conflict. Perhaps the most famous line from his book, “war is a stern teacher,” comes from the civil war in Corcyra:

This passage fits the Korean civil war with no necessity to dot “i”s or cross “t”s, and it explains the continuing blight on the Korean mind drawn by that war, just like a doctor drawing blood: to understand the Korean War “from all sides” is still to go to jail in the North, and to risk oblivion in the now (and finally) democratic South. It also fits the American civil war, by far the most devastating of all American wars to Americans, but one that happened long enough ago that most Americans have no idea what it means to
have warfare sweeping back and forth across the national territory, or to have brother pitted against brother.

This was Paul Fussell’s title for the Great War.
¹⁰
It would never occur to anyone to say that about Korea; if this war exists in American literature, it is usually wallpaper for people who may or may not have fought there, but came of age in the 1950s. From this war came nothing like Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
, Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
, or Michael Herr’s
Dispatches
. Neither a victory like World War II nor a defeat like Vietnam, it struck a glancing blow at young people who looked up to their parents who fought in the big war, had yet to encounter Vietnam, and seem ultimately to have been bewildered by Korea, not to have
seen
the war in its fullness, and quickly to have passed it by (if they didn’t fight in it). The war was and remains, after all, a stark counterpoint to the halcyon 1950s—the easy “I like Ike” years of nearly full employment, Hollywood in Technicolor and James Dean in full adolescent sulk, TV in its
Ozzie and Harriet
phase of light family entertainment, Detroit turning out brilliantly painted and chromed lead sleds, cars with rocketlike tail fins and busty Marilyn Monroe front bumpers—it was all there by 1955 (the year Newt Gingrich once nominated as the apex of the American dream). This nostalgia elides segregation, a stultifying conformity, and of course the Korean War. But most young people loved these years. To experience Elvis and Little Richard and Fats Domino when nothing like them had ever appeared on the horizon (of white folks), with every fond hope for the future—it’s just another reason why the war got buried.

James Salter’s beautiful memoir,
Burning the Days
, briefly recounts his six months in Korea—a substitute for World War II, since he got his pilot’s wings just as that war ended. This memoir might be the script for
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
. Probably the best-known
Hollywood film of the war, the action takes place mostly in Japan, the narrative line is World War II—and Toko-ri is the Japanese pronunciation of a Korean village. It appeared when Hollywood “felt itself besieged” by McCarthyism, and neatly avoided all the controversies of this war.
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Likewise, the country and the people leave not a bare trace on Salter’s mind. He remembers cold winter mornings, anonymous Korean women serving him “bunja [orange] juice” at breakfast (or not—in which case they say “hava-no bunja”), headings for his bombing runs into the North, the girls at Miyoshi’s in Japan. “There remains with me not the name of a single battle of the time or even general other than Van Fleet.” What he discovered in Korea he also kept hidden, because it was so hard to articulate—“a deep attachment—deeper than anything I had known—to all that had happened,” and to the self he became, “based on the risking of everything.” It was the “great voyage” of his life, the burning days of youth, but it just happened to have happened in Korea. There are not many American memoirs of this war, but nearly all of them also follow a Toko-ri narrative: Korea is a never-known nightmare to be escaped in one piece; Japan is civilized, beautiful, with a petite culture only to be admired—not to mention the floor shows, the Ginza, the golf courses.
¹²

Philip Roth’s
Indignation
appears at first to reinhabit the territory of his collegiate days at Bucknell, a return to the terrain of his first novel,
Goodbye, Columbus:
the Midwest. Marcus Messner, a butcher’s son from Newark, goes off to Winesburg College near Cleveland, studies the usual literary suspects, fumbles with girls in the backseats of cars, and ends up on the dean’s list—his shit list: Korea beckons. Roth’s novelistic treatment of the war he lived through does not go beyond the tropes and stereotypes of the time: “swarms” of Chinese, snow, “wave after wave” of Chinese, more snow, “a thousand screaming Chinese soldiers come swarming down on you”—and it’s still snowing. What was the war about? It remains a mystery. So the Chinese swarm and the snows fall, but
Roth’s climactic “coldest winter” comes in the Winesburg blizzard of ’51, ostensibly a panty raid gone wild that gets him kicked out of college unfairly—and Korea awaits him. The war is reduced to the Chinese hordes and “some barbed wire on a spiny ridge in central Korea,” but there his young life is snuffed out and his ghost reflects on what his father, a simple butcher, had tried to teach him: “the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”

Roth interrupts his narrative, however, with a discourse on memory as “the all-embracing medium in which I am sustained as ‘myself’” and the receptacle for life: “Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?” It slowly dawns on the reader that Roth is writing posthumously—he is dead, and his afterlife is experienced in memories—“an imperishable fingerprint of an afterlife unlike anyone else’s.” It is an afterlife, but it is his own, uniquely, in a permanent condition of “memory upon memory, nothing but memory.” He is right: memory is synonymous with oneself. His memory is immortal; the war is not—it recedes into oblivion.

No other American journalist so fully inhabited his time and ranged so widely, from the seriousness of
The Best and the Brightest
and courageous reporting from Vietnam to barnstorming with the Chicago Bulls or the New England Patriots, than David Halberstam. What other journalist so deeply explored the history through which he lived? Phillip Roth and Don DeLillo do this in fiction, but who else in nonfiction? Whether it was in Saigon or the ballpark, David was the one. I met David twice, first when I invited him to the University of Chicago and the next when we spent an afternoon talking about the Korean War. He left a message saying he was doing a book on the war and wanted to talk. I was flabbergasted that I could call back his published Manhattan number, and he picked up! He was charming, gracious, vital, engaging—and we didn’t see eye to eye about the war. Then came the coldest April in 2007,
when he died en route to interview the legendary quarterback Y. A. Tittle. A shocking, capricious, tragic auto accident stilled his resonant journalist’s voice for the first time since his high school days.

Although the Korean War ended only a few years before Vietnam, it is as if a generation intervened between these two wars. Type “Korean War” on the Amazon website, and a few books come up that are still in print—usually by veterans or military historians. On
Amazon.com
a person named Edmund Burke listed “The Ten Best Books on the Korean War.” All but one are by Americans or Westerners, and that one is a novel by Ha Jin (Koreans presumably do not write about their own war). Most of the books are decades old, and no books by scholars make the list.
¹³
Browse a library, and you will find rack after rack on the Vietnam War, and just one or two for the Korean War. Halberstam actually counted them, in a public library in Key West: eighty-eight books on the Vietnam War, four on Korea.

It took years of research to find out that Marilyn Monroe was discovered during the Korean War and dubbed “Miss Flamethrower,” or that Margaret Bourke-White took hundreds of photos for
Life
not just of the war and the soldiers, but of the unknown guerrilla war in the South. It was only when Picasso died that I learned, in the fine print of his obituary, about his mural
Massacre in Korea
, in the style of
Guernica. M*A*S*H
remains an all-time popular TV series, because it may be set in Korea, but it’s really about the Vietnam War—it has that sensibility. So it is to Halberstam’s great credit that he did his last book on this war (of course, we all know it wouldn’t have been close to his last book).

David Halberstam would have been the first to say that if someone thinks that Ted Williams’s .406 batting average in 1941 is not awe-inspiring, well, you might not necessarily want to talk baseball with that person. Unfortunately,
The Coldest Winter
is full of passages that strike a historian in the same way. For example, that Dean Acheson made “a colossal gaffe” at the Press Club in January 1950 by leaving South Korea out of his defense perimeter, or that Kim Il
Sung was a dependent plaything of the Russians and Chinese, or that the invasion of the North in the fall of 1950 was MacArthur’s idea, or that the June 1950 invasion started this conflict. Exactly two Korean names from the South show up in his book—Syngman Rhee, the president, and Paek Son-yop, the all-purpose former general trotted out for every prominent visiting journalist since the war ended, who fought alongside imperial Japan and was for decades a close associate of Japanese war criminals such as Sasakawa Ryoichi and assorted unrepentant Nazis.
¹⁴
Halberstam mentions the U.S. Military Government from 1945 to 1948, which deeply shaped postwar Korean history—in one sentence. There is absolutely nothing on the atrocious massacres of this war, or the American incendiary bombing campaigns. Instead Korea is “a shrimp among whales” (a stereotype from 1900), an insignificant country with a bunch of leaders who, it seems, are hard to take seriously—and so on.
The Coldest Winter
is one of the best in a peculiar but common American genre: accounts of the war that evince almost no knowledge of Korea or its history, barely get past two or three Korean names, focus on the American experience in a war where Koreans and Chinese were much more numerous, and fail to question the accumulated baggage of 1950s stereotypes about the good guys and bad guys.