The Korean War Memorial

Part 3 of my adventure which began on Sunday.  Backdated from a week later because I'm still a bad person.

The Korean War Memorial, 2:00pm

We forget that there was more to the Fifties than Eisenhower, big cars, drive-ins, and sock-hops.  From 1950 to 1953, we were also in a war.  It's a war no one remembers, but it's also a war which is technically still going on today, since North and South Korea never signed an armistice.  A thin strip of demilitarized wasteland runs across the peninsula, separating two countries which, today, are as different as night and day.  At the time of the war, however, they must not have been quite so different.

Unpleasant statistic, isn't it.

It was not a particularly glorious war for the United States and its allies from the UN, and it is not memorialized in a particularly glorious fashion.  The memorial, while it is undoubtedly meaningful for people who were affected by the Korean War, is not stupendous.  For one, I suspect that it could fit inside the Lincoln Memorial with room to spare on either side, but more importantly, it tries to be too many things at once - reflecting pool, statuary garden, memorial wall, and park, all at once.

 

Here you can see all but the pool, which is behind me and to the left.  Also to the left, but further up, is the flag pole (feature #5) and this:

It reads "Our nation honors her sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met."

Now, I appreciate the poetic sentiment - "a country they never knew and a people they never met" is a great turn of phrase, sure - but I object to the actual sentiment.  I can understand that these men and women - American soldiers and service-people - didn't know the country and didn't get to know it (in the sense of becoming familiar with it) because they were killed, but are we really to believe that all of the Americans who died in Korea did so with such rapidity that they never met a single Korean?  I think this bothers me because by this logic - or implication, perhaps - the Koreans become faceless and without identity.  They also become passive and non-participatory, which is bogus, since South Korea deployed troops of its own, and surely the Americans encountered them, even if they didn't encounter civilians.  I don't trust M*A*S*H as a historical source, but there are encounters between Koreans and Americans depicted there, and I refuse to believe that were fabricated out of thin air, since the author of the book (which inspired the film and the television series) was in fact a doctor in Korea during the war.

In any case, between the plaques, statues, wall, pool, flag pole, shrubs, and strategically placed trees and benches, the energy of the memorial feels diffused.  The individuals components, taken on their own, are fine.  Some are quite poignant:

These are photographs of some of the Americans who died in Korea, etched into granite.  What makes this picture work for me, though, is the reflections of the living people passing by visible alongside those who have passed on.  This part of the memorial works, and the pool is nice on its own, too.  But the elements are too disparate, the energy too diffused, and it doesn't pull into a cohesive whole.  Perhaps this is appropriate, since the Korean War was a conflict which solved nothing, maintained the status quo, but failed to do more because of catastrophic miscalculation; had UN troops just defended rather than going well beyond South Korea's borders to China (almost), it seems doubtful that the Chinese would have entered the conflict and thrown the UN forces all the way back to the present border and thereby assured that nothing would change on the peninsula.  For a country which still remembered its decisive victories in the Second World War it was probably frustrating.  Appropriately - and perhaps tragically - the memorial is too.