Crawdad
Member
My first duty station was Korea. Your experiences there remind me a lot of my own. When we weren't in the field, I'd spend my weekends exploring the hills around Dongducheon by day, and of course, drinking and chasing skirt by night. I was only 19; still a big kid, really, so finding old bunkers and trench lines was still the coolest thing ever. My best find was an entire bunker complex with interconnecting trenches and tunnels.
But nevertheless, the end game of ridding the Korean peninsula of the Kim dynasty once and for all was halted at the 35th parallell, or thereabouts. With unspeakable horrors befalling the poor unlucky north Koreans, and still going on, with the latest fat boy Kim in charge.
Why didn’t the yanks and their allies just keep pushing the communists north, getting rid of the Kims once and for all? Instead of the current mess with the north armed with nukes and ICMs as well? A bit like the Iraq mess, but potentially worse.
Now, that was my take on historyh
Funnily enough, General Douglas MacArthur had the same idea back in November 1950; why stop at the 38th parallel and just return to the status quo ante, especially when they had the Nork's on the run? President Truman was concerned that the Chinese didn't want a unified, democratic Korea bordering them, because that could be used as a beach-head for a later western invasion. Truman reasoned that China would enter the war if MacArthur pushed to close to their border, and ordered Dougie Mac to stop advancing. MacArthur said "Screw you Mr. President, I'm General MacArthur, I do what I want, we gone win this shit and be home 'fore Christmas", did not stop, pushed all the way to the Yalu River (the chinese border)--
And, brother, MacArthur was wrong. Big time.
See, what had happened was: about a bajillion fuggin' chinamen done come screaming across the Yalu, threw the Allies back to the 38th parallel-- where the front would pretty much remain static for the remainder of the war-- and MacArthur was cashiered. Oops.
