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Remembering the Forgotten War: Armistice Day, July 24
July 24, 1953, the UN forces, a thin cover for the United States, and the Chinese, with their new client state the North Koreans, stopped shooting at each other across the Korean Demilitarized Zone. This year is also the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the war, started when the North Korean communists launched a lightening strike south, nearly winning before the U.S. could get enough troops, with the right equipment, supply lines, and leadership into place. This was the first war of the nuclear era, with the Soviets and U.S. each possessing deployable atomic bombs. Neither the Russians nor the United States wanted to have done to their cities what we had done to two Japanese cities. This was an important condition underlying the unwillingness to seek total victory. Today, South Korea stands as a sharp rebuke to any who would excuse or romanticize communism. Children born during that war on the two sides of the line have had such different lives. The two societies from one people have diverged so markedly.
Here is the annual presidential proclamation, designating July 27 as National Korean War Veterans Armistice Day:
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The news media condemns itself, as does our political class, once more, with their relative silence. A true American hero, whose virtue was proved in the skies of two wars, the hell on earth of the worst part of the Communist Vietnamese torture chambers, and in the halls of Congress that so often corrupt, has been called home. Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel, retired Congressman Sam Johnson went home on Wednesday, May 27, 2020, at the age of 89. There is a famous photograph of Colonel Johnson reunified with his wife, Shirley, after seven years of captivity. At the end of May 2020, I believe they were reunified a second time. We do not know what Heaven is actually like, but we may well imagine these two people embracing again in bodies not ravaged by this fallen world.
“In my opinion, the M1 rifle is the greatest battle implement ever devised.” — 
If North Korea starts another major war or major conflict then it seems we have every reason to agree with Douglas MacArthur that we should have gone in against the Chinese and settled things permanently. I’m not belittling the risks with that nor do I know enough to authoritatively criticize what the leaders were up against but I really do think that the Chinese Communists couldn’t stand up to us and Mao needed to be slapped down. It’s clear also that the Soviets were behind the whole thing, too — that definitely makes one wonder what to do. However, giving Mao a defeat and uniting Korea into a western-oriented government could well have been better.
