The Korean War is weird because on one hand it was one of those wars not even like Iraq II so much as Afghanistan where it’s not only an unsatisfying result but it doesn’t matter that much cause it turns out to have been pretty peripheral to the American narrative and interests anyway, but on the other it’s like our last great war of large-scale maneuver \u2013 more than WWII where we pretend the Battle of the Bulge was even in the same ballpark as any continental army’s land warfare experience, shading more into what people expected of World War III in those pre-ICBM days
And on the third hand we kind of had the WWII mindset (and the broad draftee military fighting it) still around and going and preparing for WWIII, and writing this into the national epic \u2013 like, the Korean War was known as “The Forgotten War”, something that I absorbed by osmosis having been born 3 decades afterwards because, unlike the many truly forgotten wars in American history, people remembered it \u2013 there was a memorial in my hometown, and representation at civic holiday parades, M*A*S*H may really “have been about” the Vietnam War, but it was set in the actual historic Korean War.
"}