Vets find South Koreans thankful for their service

When a delegation of Maine Korean War veterans contemplated returning to Korea as guests of the South Korean government and the Korean Veterans Association last fall, a half-century after they had been there on more serious business, it may have crossed their minds that it’s sometimes best to let sleeping ghosts lie.

But in the end, the $750 price tag for an adventure that normally would cost several thousand dollars was simply an offer they couldn’t refuse, and off they jetted to partake in elaborate ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of the signing of a mutual defense treaty between the United States and the Republic of Korea.

“I had never really wanted to go back, and at first I wasn’t going to,” Army veteran Paul Curtis of Bangor said Wednesday when I met him through former BDN stablemate Ken Buckley, a Marine veteran of the war who also made the trip. “But then I decided to go, because I’m so cheesy I couldn’t turn down a deal like that.” Nor could Buckley nor the other participants from the Burton-Goode-Sargent chapter of the Korean War Veterans Association: Jesse Wilson, Ed Davis, George McCann and Yong Cha Jones.

It turned out to be one of his better decisions, the 72-year-old Curtis, a retired Husson College professor of microbiology, acknowledged. “I couldn’t help wondering how I would react to returning to the place which had had such a profound effect on me in my youth 50 years ago.”

A former infantryman with the Fifth Regimental Combat Team, Curtis had hoped to make it back to Outpost Harry in the so-called Iron Triangle just north of the 38th Parallel, where he had a life-altering experience on the night of June 12, 1953.

In the midst of an eight-day assault on the strategic outpost by an entire Chinese Communist division, he found himself in a firestorm, the fury, terror and grief of which he wanted never to see again. “It was sheer bedlam. I had never heard anything like it. Everything let loose at once. Machine guns, mortars, artillery, automatic rifles, bazookas, grenades, flares, search lights, Chinese bugles…” Curtis emerged unscathed, which is more than could be said for the Chinese division, which was annihilated in one of the more savage battles of the latter days of the war.

But since the battlefield site lies in the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, he never got to visit his old outpost. It was his one regret of the tour, but it’s probably just as well, he acknowledged. He has his memories.

Sites once familiar to the Maine vets were practically unrecognizable 50 years after the fact. Curtis found Inchon to be “a large, bustling port city which had no relationship whatsoever with the Inchon I remember as I climbed down ropes into a bobbing landing craft in 1953.” In Seoul, he “didn’t recognize a damn thing except the old South Gate.” The once-drab and destitute South Korean capital is now a vibrant modern city of 11 million people with a skyline the envy of any major western city. Villages such as Yongdong Po, familiar to so many GIs so long ago, appear to have been swallowed by the metropolis.

Pammunjom, some 35 miles north of Seoul, where the armistice was signed, has become a hot tourist attraction. Silent, rigid and unarmed North Korean and South Korean guards, chosen for their imposing physical presence, icily stare down one another across the demarcation line, the South Koreans locked in a martial arts pose that fairly shouts, “Bring it on, Charlie.”

Visitors are warned not to point at the North Koreans nor make any sudden moves that might provoke a violent response, and to not even think about stepping across the line. Tourists on one side stare at and take pictures of tourists on the other side, who reciprocate.

The Americans got VIP treatment from start to finish, especially at the Korean Armed Forces Day demonstration and parade which Curtis labeled “the most impressive military demonstration I have ever seen.” At a lavish banquet, they were wined, dined and toasted. Each of the 110 American veterans was called, by name, to the podium and presented a medal for his wartime service.

That was nice. But even better was getting repeatedly stopped on the streets of Seoul by civilians and profusely thanked for saving their homeland so long ago. “That made us feel great,” Curtis said. “I’m impressed with what they’ve done with their country, and I think I had something to do with that. So, in that sense I feel that I did some good. …”

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.