Page 476 - 1970S

that fourth-rate countries with vastly

inferior industrial, economic and mili–

tary strength could

test

America's will,

time and time again, and find that will

weakened, unsure, and super-cautious.

It

was in

1950,

remember, that the

Russians exploded a hydrogen bomb.

And from that time to this, there has

always loomed the spectre of a nudear–

armed Soviet Russia to haunt the minds

of American leadership. Each incident,

no matter how seemingly trivial, in no

matter how seemingly insignificant cor–

nee of the world, was viewed in the per–

spective of the Soviets and the Bomb.

And so, for the first time, Americans

tried to fight a "conventional war" for

limited political purpose, for limited

military objectives, with "conditioned

response" and the piecemeal contribu–

tion of military hardware and person–

nel. She did this, in

spite

of the

warnings from such battle-hardened

Generals as "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell,

who urged that Americans

never

get

involved in a land war in Asia.

But American soldiers had never

been, prior to Korea, treated like for–

e,ign legionnaires. They had never been

asked to die for limited política! objec–

tíves. They had never been ordered up

frozen hills to die, only to "demon–

strate" a point to an imperturbable,

tough, patient enemy. Wars of attrition,

they thought, died in the trenches of

France. To fight to make the world safe

for Democracy was one thing. But to

fight to demonstrate U. S. policy of

"containment" of Communism in a far–

off, foreign land was quite another.

So, in Korea, America ignored the

lessons of history, and wrote yet another

bloody Jesson which, when viewed m

retrospect, makes the grisly agony of

Vietnam ever more ghastly.

General Stillwell and others referred,

in fact, more to the fetid, stinking rice

paddies of Burma - to the steaming

jungles and tortuous hills of southeast

Asia, than the península of Korea. They

knew Americans could not fight great

tank battles

in

the jungle. A Patton, or

a Mark dark, would be totally out of

place there. They knew more about the

stoical peasant

mind

of Asians than

leaders of a later time.

And they knew, on a simpler level,

the basic truth that,

in

battle, when

troops go to the ground, each individual

soldier becomes personally isolated.

They knew his view of the battle is only

what he sees through thick trees and

brush, that the big picture, the colored

maps, tactical plans and logistics of

massive troop movements are lost on

him. They knew Asían jungles had to

5

be the world's worst place to fight a

war.

And they knew the Asían people's

fantastic capacity for living on the

barest diet, a mere handful of rice daily,

traveling prodigious distances on foot,

and seldom falling victim to the always

prevalent endemic diseases of the

jungle.

They knew an Asian could drink

water from the same streams as an

American - the Asían soldier would

go on to fight, and the American would

develop serious, and sometimes fatal,

dysentery.

But the hard-earned lessons of World

War II were not heeded prior to Korea.

And the doubly-hard-earned lessons

of Korea were somehow ignored prior

to Vietnam.

All the knowledge of former Asian

jungle fighters, including the bitter les–

saos 1earned by the French at Dien Bien

Phu were somehow unimportant in the

high-level political objectives of demon–

strating to the world America would

say: "No Communism allowed here."

Make no mistake. Korea was an

absolute turning point of recent history.

lt was the first big growing crack in the

PRIDE

of America's power.

Take a look at the ironic parallels

between Korea and Vietnam - and

what they have done to the American

spirit at home.

The "Parallel" Wars

In Korea, as in Vietnam, Americans

were fighting side by side with Oriental

peoples who were, in turn, fighting

against their own kind. To Americans

in Korea "all Koreans looked alike."