Try to imagine yourself back then, just done with first WW1 and then WW2 and settling down with your slippers, instant coffee, and rolled-up newspaper ready to enjoy that very hard-earned peace dividend for a few decades at least (“we earned it, right?”) and then… it’s only 1950’s but now Communism is relentlessly attacking, advancing, taking over the world and we’re facing an open contest of wills in some place called the “Korean Peninsula” with the underlying question of who’s planet is it going to be? the rules-based order of the West, or, the Communist juggernaut’s.

Enter the slugfest of the Korean Conflict: a brutally ugly war.  Much of our USA tech advantage was nullified by the remote, mountainous terrain, so it was pretty much mano-a-mano and a battle of wills. We entered into the contest soft and unwilling, more adapted to garrison-life than to brutal fighting, and quickly got shellacked by the hard mountain-men of the Northern peninsula and the Southern Chinese. In no time flat we were driven immediately back to nothing-more than the toe-hold called the Pusan perimeter, and we were about to be annihilated completely.

Enter the audacious Hail-Mary of the Inchon Landing halfway up the peninsula in one stroke cutting behind enemy lines and saving our proverbial bacon.  The landing was assumed too difficult to be achievable but we did it: made possible by a new combination of Frogmen who could scope out the bay, the tides, the landing sites for the ships; and the recent still-fresh corporate knowledge of the Big Military on how to conduct the hardest of all stunts, a major amphibious landing; and spiriting the whole thing was the commitment and audaciousness of a once committed and audacious nation.

The fighting turned because of this incredible feat and we knocked them back, way-back, all the way up to the far North thinking for a moment that maybe we’re going to pull this one off and then “wham!” they sneak one past us this time and in a big way with their low-tech hardiness (we had assumed what they actually did to have been impossible) sneaking tons of everything past our vanguard by foot in the dead of night & winter, without mechanization or flashlights so our surveillance aircraft never saw them, and didn’t we get bolloxed by it which resulted in the “frozen Chosin” and a partial retreat by us and their initiative restored.  

We subsequently found ourselves in a stalemate at the 38th parallel and there, individual hills were viciously fought over just to see which side would fight the hardest and longest and suffer the most, and the truce negotiations were intentionally slow-walked for years because the Communists figured they could drag their feet and break our will, and all the while young fighters were sent into the meat grinder for no apparent reason at all other than be as tough as the other side was but with it as awful as it was we stopped the advance of that truly hellish ideology, and we’ve been holding that line for about 75 years since.  And the difference between modern-day South Korea and North Korea tells absolutely everything we need to know about whether or not it was worth it:   Were we willing to let them win and make the whole damn world into a North Korea, as was the Communists’ stated intent?  Or were we willing to fight and make our own decisions about how our world would be?  Remember the difference between East Germany and West Germany?  Between the Warsaw Pact and Western Europe?  Those days, and that fighting is unfortunately not over. 

Because now we have the authoritian Putin and his conquest war into Ukraine (and soon enough into Eastern Europe) and all this is falling on the heels of an exhausting 20+ years of US led Global War Against Terrorism.  Never mind the details of that GWOT right now; what people in the USA and the Western led global order feel is that “we want our Peace Dividend!” And that’s natural, that’s normal, that’s idyllic, that’s without a doubt “how the world should be.”

Only the world isn’t that way, is it?  Homo sapiens is a very fraught species of animal, a beast that is constantly at war with itself. Our present peril is Putin who is evil, violent, on the march, and he’s totally going to win in Ukraine if we in US and Europe don’t do more to oppose it. Then he’s going to kill, deport, imprison, work-camp, and brainwash them all exactly as they used to do over and over again in the Soviet Union, and exactly as he’s already done in the occupied parts of Ukraine; and then he will use the young ones that he’s grabbed, coerced, and brainwashed and force them to fight-on in Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Moldova, Romania, Czech Republic… and he will fight to take back everything that the Soviet Union once had and everything that Imperial Russia once had, because that’s what he wants.  

And he’s not just doing it militarily but with all domains:  he’s got legions working to produce a comprehensive parallel universe of fake news, cyber attacks, and bought-off candidates throughout Europe, and the list goes on and on.  Ordinary, normal people like us cannot even comprehend or believe that he’s up to so much perfidy so we deny it, we minimize it, we look away to make it go away, and we thus enable it all to proceed unopposed.

Seizing the opportunity of Europe and USA floundering in Eastern and Central Europe, Xi Jinping will take Taiwan and all of the South China Sea, at a minimum, because he has a shopping list of his own that he’s been waiting to get done.

So this Memorial Day I visit my Dad’s grave, a Korea War vet who served his tour at Panmunjom, and ask him what to do.