"I feel a great deal of gratitude. I've been all over the
world, and perhaps I have a perspective other people
don't. This is a blessed country." Dr. Untae Kim, right,
with fellow Korean-American Sunny Lippold
Posted on 07/26/2003 8:41:46 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
For Korean-Americans, the 50th anniversary of the end of the Korean War is a chance to look back at the sacrifices of U.S. troops - and one more time, to say thanks
Coming between the exhilaration of victory in World War II and the divisiveness and agony of Vietnam, it was sometimes called the "forgotten war."
But to those who survived it, the Korean War is not easily forgotten.
Sunday is the 50th anniversary of the end of the fighting, and while ceremonies in Washington and South Korea will attract most of the attention, several hundred people are expected at 11 a.m. in Veterans' Park on the Buffalo waterfront for the rededication of the Korean War Memorial.
The memorial, with the names of 291 Western New York residents who were among 36,500 U.S. military personnel killed in the war, was in the basement of Memorial Auditorium for four years while construction went on around it.
Korean-Americans, who number nearly 2,300 in Erie County according to the 2000 census, played a big part in raising $125,000 to establish the monument, and many will be there Sunday to celebrate the truce anniversary.
U.S. troops "came to Korea to save us from communism at the risk of their lives. How could we forget that?" said John Sung, chief executive officer of Windsong Radiology Group in Amherst, which he operates with his wife, Dr. Janet Sung.
John Sung grew up in the countryside outside Seoul and remembers waving to columns of U.S. troops and tanks headed north, and seeing planes dropping bombs.
Janet Sung was 3 years old when her father, an officer in the South Korean army, was killed on the third day of the war.
She recalls walking "forever" while her mother carried her 10-month-old brother as they fled the fighting.
The Sungs arrived in this country with $200 in 1972. They now operate five radiology centers.
They like to show their gratitude and in 2000 donated $1 million to the University at Buffalo for medical school scholarships.
Dr. Untae Kim, a retired pathologist at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, was in his second year of medical school in Seoul when the war started when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950.
He had seen the communist way of life while growing up in China (although his parents were Korean) and volunteered to help staff an aid station for the expected wounded. But the fighting shifted away from the city, and it wasn't until after the Inchon Landing in September that Kim got to do his part.
He spoke English and volunteered as a translator with the Army's 7th Infantry Division.
He recalled he was one of the first to know that Chinese troops were about to enter the war when the information was obtained from captured North Korean soldiers.
"But no one believed us," he said.
Kim spent 18 months as an unpaid volunteer and later returned to medical school before coming to this country in 1953.
"I feel a great debt of gratitude," the 76-year-old Snyder resident said. "I've been all over the world, and perhaps I have a perspective other people don't. This is a blessed country," he said of his adopted land.
He was among the Korean-Americans who said North Korea - with its admitted program to develop nuclear weapons - poses a major threat to world peace and stability.
"We should have invaded North Korea before Iraq," Kim said.
Although Americans died at the rate of almost 1,000 a month, the toll was even higher for South Korea, which lost 415,000 troops, and North Korea, which lost an estimated 500,000. Chinese dead were estimated at 900,000, and the civilian toll was more than 1 million.
Dr. Sung and others said it upsets them to see young South Koreans demonstrating against the U.S. military presence in South Korea.
She still has family there and said the news media have exaggerated the extent of the demonstrations.
"That is a total misconception, and the counterdemonstrations (by those who support U.S. involvement) are not shown," she said.
Sunny Lippold was a young girl in Seoul when the invasion started. She still shudders as she recalls the sight of American POWs being beaten and a young Korean woman being shot to death when she tried to flee from a North Korean soldier.
When her own son, a U.S. Navy ensign, was called to serve in the first Persian Gulf War, the former Sun Joo Chung said, "I lost my mind" with flashbacks and worry.
It also brought home what it must have been like for mothers who lost sons.
"I started to realize what the Korean War met to Americans and its soldiers," she said.
"And it brought back to me how grateful I am to this country.
"It took me five years to recover. How could soldiers handle seeing their friends killed?"
Thanks for the post, Joe. Powerful.
Thank you Tom Ernst and Buffalo News.
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I know several Vietnames refugees who would disaggree with that statment. Much the same was said of the ROK forces during the Korean war as was said of the ARVN forces during Vietnam. The ARVN, with some help from US air power, fought off a combined arms assault by the NVA, after most US troops had been withdrawn. Then the US Congress cut off their ammunition, spare parts and other logistics support, and the NVA were successfull in their next assault, which was also a combined arms assualt, with tanks, self propelled artillery and so forth.
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