Korean War paused 50 years ago
 

by Michael Erskine
MANITOULIN---It has been 50 years since the worst of the fighting in
the Korean War stopped, but that war has never officially ended, and
to this day, millions of soldiers stare at each other across the
demilitarized zone.
Most recently, the American and South Korean soldiers pulled back
from their positions near the border. Not lessening tensions, but
heightening them, as North Korea has been rattling a nuclear sabre to
extort desperately needed support from the capitalist west.
The South, railed the North in hastily called news conferences, were
acting aggressively by pulling their troops out of range of the
North's artillery. Such is the state of an uneasy peace.
Peter Loosemore, who enlisted as a young man from Manitoulin,
recalled his return from overseas, and the time he had spent counting
the days until that return. He was interviewed by the Expositor at
the time, but there are memories that still sit closely with him even
now, a half-century later.
"I remember the people most of all," he said, contacted at his
Edmonton home. "People, wall-to-wall people."
For a young man raised in the sparsely populated rural environs of
Manitoulin, the sheer number of people was quite a shock.
"As we pulled into a town on the dirty little trains they had us
packed into, children would come out in their Sunday best," he
recalled. "They weren't begging for food, which they would take, but
for pencils and paper. We were so amazed that people would be so
hungry for education, something we really took for granted. By the
time the train got to where we were going, we had been cleaned out.
There wasn't a pencil or paper to be had on that train."
The people, Mr. Loosemore recalled, were very friendly, even though
in the midst of war they had it pretty rough.
"They had a tendency to liberate whatever they could," he said. "Not
to sell, but because they desperately needed everything."
As to his stint in the artillery, he found most of it pretty boring,
and very sticky.
"There was lots of mud," he said, evoking a theme most often recalled
by combat vets from the Korean War. "It got into everything."
Mr. Loosemore hadn't gone looking for boredom and mud. Like many
young men headed off to war, he was looking for adventure.
"That changed after getting there," he laughed.
There were a lot of Second World War veterans, men who knew what war
was like, how it had been in Europe. Nothing they had experienced
prepared them for war in Korea though.
There was of course the glorious cause of repelling an aggressive
invader, the Communist North had poured across the border to annex
the capitalist south. The United Nations had sent in troops to stop
the aggression and to push back the invaders and save the South from
the evil Reds, but all that was largely lost on the young Mr.
Loosemore and his compatriots.
"For us," he said. "It was going on an adventure. The bad things were
what happened to the other guy."
There were a lot of other guys, from dozens of nations, each being
rotated in and out of the front lines. Mr. Loosemore met a lot of
people from many different countries, but he rarely saw any of the
people from back home. Travelling in a war zone is dangerous business.
"We stayed put mostly," he said. Oddly enough though, when Jim Still
came by to see him, Mr. Loosemore was away from the firebase. "It
really wasn't a place to go wandering about."
The enemy always seemed to be too well informed about what was
happening on the other side of the lines. Greetings came through
propaganda broadcasts and leaflets fired high into the air over the
trenches.
One Christmas morning, the troops awoke to find gaily coloured cans
decorating the barbed wire surrounding the post. Engineers checked
each one for traps and discovered the cans were filled with small
presents and propaganda urging them to not fight.
"We thought it was a pretty good joke," he said. "That they would go
through so much trouble."
The propaganda value, judging from its effect, was minimal. Still it
was disconcerting to find the green and red wrapped presents so close
to their beds.
"We were constantly being infiltrated by people from the North," he
said. "Although the people there always seemed to be able to tell the
difference, we had a hard time picking them out."
Interpreters were an important part of any patrol. Refugees would
occupy empty bunkers, sometimes from the North, sometimes from the
South, but without the interpreters many tragedies could easily have
occurred. Tensions in war are always high.
"The consequences could have been terrible," said Mr. Loosemore.
Most people of today's generations know about the Korean War because
of the popular television series MASH, a sitcom about a medical unit
that lasted far longer than the war itself, but Mr. Loosemore noted
the movie and television series used a lot of poetic licence.
"It wasn't accurate at all," he said. "We had a Norwegian MASH unit
stationed near us. They were very professional. There were none of
the nonsense you saw on television."
In fact, the only really accurate thing portrayed in the series was
the use of the helicopter to evacuate the wounded.
"The helicopter first made its promise known as a useful tool there," he said.
Mr. Loosemore and many of his friends in the Edmonton area belong to
a Korean War Veteran's Association. A number of them went over for
the 50th anniversary ceremonies, and said they were very well treated.
"I hope to go over someday," said Mr. Loosemore. "I want to see if
all those pencils and paper made any difference."
South Korea is an economic powerhouse in Asia and it is very likely
that many of the people who were beneficiaries of the Canadian
soldier's largesse put them to good use. With thousands of guns still
trained on their northern brethren, and a war that remains
unresolved, those writing materials may yet prove to have been the
best legacy of all.

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