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 – 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 – 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 – 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.

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

“The Golden State Warriors championship parade is underway—” triumph. It’s a triumph.

I grew up with the WW2 vets getting together and driving their halftracks through the center of town every year and didn’t really think about that

Thinking about how the holidays of Memorial Day (1968, originally the Civil War triumph holiday “Decoration Day”) and Veterans Day (originally the WWI triumph holiday “Armstice Day”) defined summer in the last third of the American 20th century

The thing was a lot of the guys in those parades were really Korea vets

kontextmaschine:

America would’ve won a total nuclear war in 1951 and MacArthur shoulda forced *Truman* to resign

the trick is realizing it woulda been a close fight ‘cause between war weariness and communist sympathy, there’d be rebellion on the American home front

like there was hella backlash after WWI which was already resisted by a big international pacifist movement

(in America we repressed but also invented the idea of the “conscientious objector” to accommodate them; in the German Empire they were hanged as traitors)

and WWII seemed to be leading to reward

(tho there was a HUGE urban affordable housing issue in the late 40s, LOL)

but Korea was kind of a weird draw, first we (= the UN, which we managed to align as ‘The First World’ here, which is why we keep the UN around and what Bush the Elder thought he was following through on with Desert Storm)

okay what was I saying? First we were “ra ra, we’re so modern and advanced, check out how far we can project power, a front-line army in SE Asia!”

and then Russia/China were like “bitch we live here and we’re huge and you’re getting too close, deal with these huge waves of infantry and tanks”

And we got the shit beat out of us but we did this cool leapfrogging combined arms transport with ships and helicopters and it was like “ha ok still kinda modern tho”

And we called it a tie and forgot about it

But point being going into Vietnam it wasn’t just feckless kids not wanting to die who shunned it but but their “Greatest Generation” (or “Silent”) parents who knew that war could pay off, but weren’t sure this one would

They hadn’t seen Saving Private Ryan yet, so

(also along the way we bombed the everloving shit out of Korea, like, the peninsula, it was the real test case for “back to the Stone Age”and we really did kill a lot of people and bring hell to a lot more in the name of securing a foothold for a vicious right-authoritarian regime, so)