Some military person in Ken Burns's Vietnam War doc:
(Paraphrasing because I watched it yesterday): "We weren't prepared for Vietnam because the last war we fought was World War 2, which required very different strategy & tactics."
Me: *spits out my drink*
Are you not going to mention KOREA, motherfucker? I know the US got itself entrenched in Vietnam at the tail end of that, but what about motherfucking Korea? My grandpa was drafted. What do you mean the last war was WW2? Then what was THAT?
I found that very odd. Maybe that was somewhat out of context or something, but I just found it odd.
Is that what they mean when they call it the "forgotten war"? Is it really just not brought up even when military veterans are talking about military history?
It just seems weird to be like "the US military had no experience at all with this sort of conflict" when yes, they did. It was very RECENT experience at the time, but it definitely seems relevant.
Just not talking about it, huh?
That's ok, my grandpa never talked about it either.
The only things I know related to his military service in Korea are: he was the company carpenter, & he wouldn't go to fireworks shows with us when I was a kid because he supposedly hated the sound. He's been dead a long time & was mentally gone before that, so that's probably all I'll ever know.
So yeah, I guess you can just memory-hole that. Probably shouldn't though.
I did grow up really patriotic & "rah-rah USA!" I was a tween around 9/11, so I got hit hard with the patriotism cannon, but
I do think the fact that I knew Grandpa had served in a war he didn't have much to say about was one of the things that kept me from fully getting into the military hero myth.
If being a soldier was so great & glorious, I would have heard about it. Instead, at BEST he was miserable & didn't want to be there & at worst...well, I'll never know.
Conscription is such a great evil. Incalculable moral injury.
Like I said, beyond "company carpenter" I have zero idea what he did or didn't do in Korea. None. I just don't know.
I do know that, if left alone, my grandpa—at the time a newly married farmer with a kid on the way—would never have gone out looking for someone to harm. He didn't even fucking hunt deer.
It is so fucking fucked up to drag people out to kill & die for you. What evil.
People are responsible for their own moral choices. I'm not denying individual responsibility.
It's just that so many people would stay home & not bother a soul if allowed real freedom of choice. How horrible is it to strong-arm people into doing grievous harm that they have no interest in doing?
I honestly think the moral injury is intentional though in a system that thrives on violence. Coercing people to violate their conscience is a way of breaking them & getting them to accept abuse & violence as inevitable.
I dunno, that's a half-baked thought still, but I think it's a thing.
@artemis there's a relevant line in the movie Troy:
"Imagine a king who fights his own battles. Wouldn't that be a sight?"
@artemis sounds very much like my uncle being drafted into the Vietnam war. Always a kind and gentle soul, he was my scoutmaster when I was young, too. When we were kids we were told that Dave had been a barber in the war and spent his time over there just cutting hair.
I learned the truth later on, he just picked the most boring sounding role he could think of and told everyone that's what he did. It kept them from asking questions which he was never going to answer. My dad told me when I was older that Dave saw most of his best friends die within the first year he was in country, along with just about every other horror imaginable. Honestly I don't know how he managed to seem normal and keep his sanity.
@artemis that fireworks thing sounds like PTSD back before we knew what to call it.
As for the forgotten war thing--yeah, we generally don't like to talk about our losses. Even Vietnam mostly is discussed in the context of cultural upheaval rather than the war itself. If not for the hippies, we might have forgotten two in a row.
@artemis We had a very close older family friend when I was young who was like a father to my mom and a grandfather to me. He was in WWII. He was the company cook, so not directly in battle I don't think, but not entirely separated from it either. I heard him talk about the war maybe two times.
My other grandpa was in Korea. I don't think I heard him talk about it once in thirty-eight years.
There's no glory in war.
US mil vet here. Yes we talk about Korea when history comes up, but usually in the form of a bleak joke involving dying on a pointless hill
@springdiesel @artemis Pretty much. I also remember seeing short bits in movies? That referenced the Korean War, and also Laos and Cambodian conflicts. Images of a refugee's backstory from some movie, but I don't remember what. There was a sitcom rerun on Nickelodeon with a Korean refugee as the family's maid? (Which, IIRC, they handled emphatically.)
A bunch of vague fuzziness. Vietnam had way more stuff about it, and in fact, I originally thought M.A.S.H. was about Vietnam.
i knew a staff sergeant in the marines who prounounced 'career' as 'korea.' does that count?
@Tim_Eagon
Truman calling it a "police action" doesn't make it so.
Maybe it's just because my grandfather was conscripted, but it's utter bullshit to not call it a war. They forced people into military service for it. That's no "police action" I've ever heard of.
@MedeaVanamonde
Truman called it that, but that was because he was fighting an illegal war.
Congress didn't declare war in Korea, but they didn't in Vietnam either. I don't know how a conflict where a very large number of people were conscripted to serve in the military does not constitute a war.
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