Busan Journal, Day 16

UNMCK

Before we left for Korea, I read David Halberstam's book The Coldest Winter, which describes American participation in the Korean War. Like any book that deals honestly with the brutality and horror of war, it made for sobering reading.

Nevertheless, I felt it was necessary reading if I hoped to understand anything about the country I would be living in from February through June.

Among the sites I felt we needed to visit during these months in Korea are those related to the Korean War. So on a day in March at the end of a long visit to the Busan Museum, we walked over to the United Nations Memorial Cemetery, which lies adjacent to the Museum and the Busan Culture Center.

We arrived ten minutes before the cemetery was set to close. The guard, a Korean United Nations soldier, was not happy to see us, but he let us in and even reopened the memorabilia room so we could have a quick look. We could tell two things from our short visit: that the cemetery was well worth a longer visit and that we needed to see it when the cherry blossoms were in bloom.

So, a week ago, in the midst of cherry blossom season, we returned to the cemetery. We walked along the long rows of graves, read the various memorials and stones, mourned the dead, and pondered the evil that draws us into armed conflict over and over and over.

I am not given to expressions of patriotism and I do not imagine war solves any problems permanently, but I must say that I was moved by our visit.

We spent considerable time walking around the grounds, noting the contributions of various countries, and reading names. It is solemn business. The names of more than forty thousand UN soldiers, thirty-six thousand of them Americans, carved on black stone panels will make you think you knew these people. You begin to see yourself behind the names.

After our tour was finished we discovered there was to be a flag raising ceremony that afternoon, so we decided to hang around. We went back to the cafeteria at the Museum and ordered waffles, the closest thing we could find to sandwiches. After ordering I saw a bottle of what looked like hand sanitizer, so I pumped a healthy glob onto my hand. "Ah," the man at the counter said, "sugar!"

After that little misunderstanding, we ate our waffles and went back to the cemetery.

When the UN soldiers had marched in and the military band began to play, I noticed how young all these soldiers looked. Tall, strong, and well trained, but all boys. All about the ages of the dead soldiers in the plots around us.

That afternoon's representative country was Canada, so we stood with the others and listened to the band play O Canada while the color guard raised the Canadian colors. We may have been the only people among the viewers who recognized O Canada, even if our knowledge comes primarily from hockey games.

At ceremony's end, the band stood in their red uniforms while various groups, some very old and others very young, stood with them for pictures. While we sat and pondered what we had seen, one little girl began sliding down the granite slab bordering the stairs where we sat.

We watched and laughed, and her father seemed pleased that I was taking her picture.

I am not entirely sure what it is we learn from cemeteries like this one. In closing his account of the Korean War, Halberstam notes that even wars we needed to fight, like this one, are filled with misjudgments, self-serving political decisions, and incomplete conclusions. Sixty years on, Korea remains divided and America has a permanent military presence here.

I am no closer than I had been in thinking of war as a solution to human problems.

Still, as we walked back to our life in Busan, I could not help considering how bleak life would have been for these welcoming people had we refused to help.