Nostalgia: Old Men, Old War

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My turn for taking only what I could carry--a few clothes, an Oriental scroll my wife had given me for my birthday--came on the third day of the war. North Korean planes, Soviet-built Yaks, had strafed the afternoon before, and our house was deserted, the servants gone. At the embassy, two jeep convoys were forming , one to join the American military advisers who were with what remained of the South Korean army, the other to find the government, which had evaporated. I was to have joined this group, but to my dismay, it had already left; perhaps I had taken too long in that last look around the house. Seoul was a human tide, surging toward Namdaemun, the city's Great South Gate, and I inched my jeep through it, fighting back an almost uncontrollable urge to jump out and hide somewhere. But at a crossroads, the others were waiting, and we pushed on into open country, along the rough gravel road snaking between paddy fields. Late that day, near Taejon, some 90 miles below Seoul, we spotted a jeep approaching. Perched in the back was the South Korean Defense Minister; Korea's autocratic old President, Syngman Rhee, could not be too far away.

The Western-style bungalow on a hillside where we set up a makeshift embassy had housed an American military adviser. Where his Korean army unit was now could only be guessed. In a parting gesture, he had smashed the typewriter, and broken keys littered the floor. Exhausted, I lay down among them. When I awoke, the American ambassador, John Muccio, a tough Italian American, was pacing the darkened room, pounding his fists together gleefully, repeating over and over, "We're coming in, we're coming in." President Truman had acted. Korea's war was now America's war.

It was a war already won, it seemed in October, when I returned as a correspondent for TIME. General Douglas MacArthur's amphibious landing at Inchon had succeeded brilliantly. The North Korean invaders, encircled from behind, had been taken prisoner by the tens of thousands. But then, as MacArthur drove northward toward the Chinese border, dividing his forces in a two-pronged offensive, Mao Zedong's "volunteers" had slipped unseen into the mountains between. Not until July 1953, after more dreadful bloodshed at places like Heartbreak Ridge and Pork Chop Hill, was the present armed truce established.

Thanks to nearly 40,000 American troops still stationed in Korea, that truce has been maintained--safeguarded along the demilitarized zone bisecting the Korean peninsula at its waist. The DMZ is a strange place today, bristling with gun emplacements and barbed wire, studded with land mines, one of which blew the legs off a South Korean army officer four days after our visit. Yet a deceptive air of tranquillity pervades its locust thickets, and in the near absence of humanity, wildlife flourishes. White cranes re-enact scenes from an ancient Chinese painting as they stalk long-legged in the flooded paddy fields, still being cultivated (under U.S. Army protection) by their South Korean owners. Over the years, the DMZ has become a tourist attraction for both sides. From the polished-steel-and-granite peace palace on our side, we peered across the demarcation line to the opposite slope, a couple of hundred yards away, where, from a similar but less imposing structure, a party of North Korean sightseers gazed back at us.