War & Peace.

Korean War memorial - Mint Hill, NC

In a park close to my house is a war memorial, the only one in North Carolina dedicated to honoring veterans of the Korean Conflict.  It's a small, serene place where one feels the need to walk quietly and conteplate the human condition. Interest in wars seems common to most men over 40, but America's police action on the Korean Peninsula during the 1950's is often overlooked and usually overshadowed by the big, brawling wars that ended with the U.S. as the obvious winner.  The Korean War, in contrast, is a complex unresolved stalemate.

His last book, published posthumously in 2007.

I ignored the Korean War like everyone else, despite the fact that my father served in the military during that period and my mother grew up in China just across the Yellow Sea, until about 5 years ago when I walked into my patient's room in the Neuro ICU and was immediately told by the family - gathered around the broad-shouldered man sleeping in the bed - that he was a Korean War hero, the obvious unspoken message  being that I should treat him well, and with deferential respect.  His actions 60 years ago were so important to them that not only did it define him, it elevated them by association.  Of course it rankles to meet people and have them promptly pull rank (no matter how marginal) but I also understand the layman's fear (no matter how irrational) that their hospitalized loved ones will be treated like leprous immigrants and require champions to verify their value.  I met their eyes, smiled, and promised them I'd care for him like the hero he was.  They exhaled hugely, smiled back; a beautiful friendship blossomed.

Good for opening boxes, cutting apples, fixing machine guns....

As we got to know each other they told me he'd been on night duty, manning a machine gun on a cold, front-line hill when Chinese soldiers attacked in the dark.  He and his unit fought furiously, his men dying all around him, enemy soldiers swarming like ants toward his icy foxhole when his gun suddenly quit firing.  He fixed it in the dark with frozen fingers using a pocket knife and resumed sweeping the slope until, after several hours of attempting to overrun their position, the Chinese finally retreated.  When dawn broke, they counted nearly 1,000 enemy bodies at the base of the hill below his gun.  "David Halberstam wrote about Daddy in his book - the last book he ever wrote", they said.  Observing my interest, they presented me with a thick, hard-bound, signed copy of The Coldest Winter - America and the Korean War on our last day together.  I devoured it over the next three weeks, utterly fascinated.  The conflict was fought using WWII soldiers and WWII techniques in terrain tragically unsuited for both - it became a foreboding precursor to the Vietnam war 10 years later. Halberstam's research and writing are so well-knit and engaging it's a hard book to put down.

Red Sox' Ted Williams vs. Yankees' Joe DiMaggio - gripping.

If you haven't discovered David Halberstam, you're in for a treat.  A soft-spoken man, he wrote about battles in war and battles in sports and little else. He cut his writing chops in Vietnam, where he won his first Pulitzer,  On April 23, 2007, at age 73, he was on his way to an interview for his new book about the NFL when he was killed in a car crash in California.  He was known for being generous with his time and talent, for his prodigious research on his topics, and for his subtle jabs at leadership he considered inept. If you're looking for context and backstory on last century's notable martial and athletic events you'd be hard-pressed to read a finer author.

It's Halberstam's Korean context that I mull as I wander peacefully through the Mint Hill memorial. Should we label it a war?  A conflict?  A police action?  Whatever it's called, it's still happening - concentrated down to a thin swath of minefields and razor-wire along the 38th parallel where soldiers still man machine guns and stare daggers at each other.  The bullet-flying battles are over for soldiers like my patient, who found peace and passed away a few months after I met him. The defining moments of his life were fortunately captured in breathtaking prose by another man, who spent his life unraveling the complexities of moments like that cold night on a dark hill, hopelessly outnumbered yet fiercely defiant. I treasure their stories. I hope they both rest in peace.