THE COLD. That is what those who made it through the Korean War remember. The flimsy fatigues. An army suddenly called to war to repel a surprise invasion of an ally-just after the country had demobilized and largely disarmed after the greatest war of all. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not so soon, not in Asia, not when attention had been focused on the Soviet threat in Europe, half a world away.
How many of the Americans drafted in 1950 could have pointed out Korea on a map, and now they were hurled into the front lines there, outnumbered and unprepared, to stop an enemy that had all the advantages: the element of surprise, the initiative, the time to plan and carry out what should have been a decisive surprise attack . . . . All the North Koreans had to do was cross a border, not wage a war an ocean away.
And it was cold. That is what those Americans who made it through the Korean War remember. No wonder a recent memoir and history of the war is titled The Coldest War.
The coldest war would last only 37 months but at its end, more than 50,000 Americans would die in what is now our Forgotten War. One of them was a priest named Emil Kapaun, who has just been awarded the Medal of Honor in a White House ceremony. Posthumously.
A chaplain, Father Kapaun was caught in the war’s biggest surprise, though it shouldn’t have been. Just as the North Koreans were being driven back and victory was within sight, Communist China with its vast reserves of manpower entered the conflict to save its ally, and did.
Father Kapaun, who was tending the wounded, was ordered to pull back with most of the troops. He chose to stay with his men, and would march/walk/stumble into a prisoner-of-war camp with them, the kind of hell that all too few Americans survived.
He shared his meager rations with his fellow Americans, leading prayers, tending the sick and wounded, and setting an example that would help the remnant survive. Till he himself could no longer go on. Dysentery, pneumonia, the rampaging diseases that were the mark of North Korean prison camps, took their toll, till he was led away by the guards and left to die without food or water.
But not before the father had conducted an Easter Sunday service with a hidden missal and blessed the guards who moved him to what the POWs called the death house. (“Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”) He was 35.
THE PRESIDENT of the United States, commander-in-chief of its armed forces, was there to conduct this ceremony at the White House, but something tells us Father Kapaun had reported to a Higher Authority long ago.
A number of the men Father Kapaun saved, now in their 80s, were at the ceremony, too. As for Emil Kapaun, he would be buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in the prison camp. Only his memory remains, still shining.
Today we are all too aware of the evil that stalks the world and those who would appease it as America pares down its military once again, asking for the next surprise attack that should not come as a surprise. We never learn.
However aware we become of the threats again facing freedom in the world, this ceremony at the White House should remind that there are also saints among us.
Editorial, Pages 18 on 04/20/2013