Photos from the Korean War

I lived by the DMZ for a couple of years in the mid-90s, and being an outdoorsy type, I did some hiking in the hills around Soyo-San, Inchon, and other spots. It's amazing how much the war changed the landscape, even decades later. At the time you couldn't find a single tree more than five or six inches wide, and all of the hills are crisscrosses with old trenches, etc. Inside the DMZ is supposedly a little bit more wild, and there are supposed to be some actual old-growth trees on the north side, but I doubt any westerner could get there to see them. If the North Korean government ever folds, it's right near the top of my bucket list to go take a look, though.

These photos bring up a lot of family history for me. Thanks for sharing them.

My mother's family lived in Seoul when the war broken out. During my mother's first birthday party, her aunt and her children came through the door looking half dead. My aunt lived further north and made the few days trek with her children and only the clothes on her back. Her husband was an engineer on a power plant, when the communist party took over. He was taken away by soldiers never to be seen again. My mother's family eventually had to flee as well, losing all their possessions and farmland.

Though my mother was too young for a first hand account of the war, we still have a single photograph of my mother's first birthday party. You can see her sitting in front of all the celebratory food. What you can't see in the picture is my aunt and her children on the other side of the room on the verge of death.

Not surprisingly, the hospital photo looks eerily like a set from MASH. I even squinted and saw Henry Blake in the back. I grew up watching the show and it was my earliest exposure to art that was explicitly (and powerfully) anti-war.

http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/07/remembering-the-kor...

Absolutely wonderful gallery, first one on the web from a major organization that made the experience enjoyable!

Also try adding scroll-behavior: smooth; to the body or :root

My father fought in this war, came in with the main U.N. invasion, fought in North Korea before being shot a couple times and sitting out the rest in a hospital in Japan trying to beat a new found morphine addiction. He very rarely talks about his time there, but pictures of modern South Korea make him stop in his tracks.

My wife is Korean, and her father and his brother were the only surviving family members from their side. Orphaned at 8 or 9, my father-in-law remembers very fondly American soldiers volunteering time to come to the orphanage and play with the kids, bring them candy, whatever.

It's not entirely impossible that my father may have been one of those soldiers giving my father-in-law chocolate. When my wife and I announced our engagement, my father-in-law felt it was deeply appropriate for the son of one of those soldiers who may have saved his life to marry one of his daughters.

If you want to better understand that kind of bond, I recommend watching this documentary on a reunion between a Korean orphan and her Turkish soldier guardian (the Allies were a U.N. force and Turkey was a major contributor of troops). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98KBGvZymMA

Sometime during the war, in order to slow the southward advancing Communist forces, all of the bridges crossing the numerous rivers in South Korea were destroyed, leaving hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees to crawl over wreckage and ford rivers on foot. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/Flight_of_Ref...

So rapidly and completely displaced were people, and so decimated the country had been, that families who were separated in the rush away from the war often never found their relatives again. In the 1980s a short run of shows trying to reconnect families swept the nation as people desperately tried to remember the names and faces of their long-lost, hopefully still living, relatives. At one point the show ran for 13 hours a day. Over 10,000 families were reunited -- decades after the war had ceased.

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/18/world/war-scattered-korean...

http://www.koreabang.com/2013/pictures/photos-in-1983-all-of...

If it weren't for the US's gracious intervention, S. Korea would have been swallowed by N. Korea and China. Unfortunately some pro-communism, pro-N. Korea activists hate the US. These people have forgotten the grace of the US. Without US support, S. Korea would still be dirt poor, just like current South Eastern countries.