Everyone talks about the (next) Korean War, but nobody does anything about it

There's a scene in ‘Hamlet' where the eponymous lead is preparing to leave the shores of Denmark with th at double-crossing duo of Rosecrantz and Gildenstern when the indecisive prince mixes it up with a Norwegian army captain who is on his way—along with a few other slack-jawed dogfaces—to fight Poland.

Frankly, this confab from the Bard is one of my favorites. With a fistful of pathos, Bill sums up the futility of war … and with his usual eloquence.

Prince Hamlet— THE perfect name for a baby ham—is needling the captain to spill the 114 on this group of fuzzy foreigners trudging through His Royal Highness's Danish dominions. The captain —w ho , I 'd like to speculate , had left a buxom, pigtailed bride back in the fiords to go once more into the breach — gives Baby Ham the lowdown:

Truly to speak, with no addition,

We go to gain a little patch of ground,

That hath in it no profit but the name.

War! Huh! Good gawd, y'all. What is good for? Absolutely nothin'! Saying it again, yeah!

This quote started pinging around my noggin while I was watching ‘Hamburger Hill' on an MBC ‘Up All Night' Movie Marathon. The film takes the Billman's narrative a step further by showing us what actually happens when the troops try to gain that patch of ground.

Here it is by the numbers: the movie references a real battle from May 10 th through the 20 th , 1969 between U.S. soldiers and (North) Vietnamese People's Army regulars on Hill 937 in the Ashau Valley near the Laotian border. Eleven times over those 10 days, soldiers of the 101 st Airborne Division tried to take the hill; the equivalent of frontal attacks on an elevated position —a real bite in the ass for your average infantryman. With practically the entire cast of the film dying before the final reel, the movie strongly suggested this was no walk in the park …(nor pulling a speck out of your eye with a pair of pliers).

According to Wikipedia, that indispensable source of information which may or may not be true, the United States lost 70 men and incurred 372 wounded, while killing 630 of the enemy (or at least those they were able to find). In addition to the casualties, Uncle Sam spent quite a few taxpayer dollars dump ing oodles of ordinance on the VPA hilltoppers.

To add insult to both painful and pointless death, after winning the hill the Americans abandoned it a couple of weeks later, and the fallout from the media coverage of the battle changed the course of the war. Nixon started to draw down the troops and the general in charge changed the military's strategy from one of “maximum pressure” on the North Vietnamese to a more defensive posture of “protective reaction” to NVA attacks.

In boxing vernacular we'd call that ‘get ting them on the ropes'.

By now you might be asking what all this has to do with nuclear weapons tests in North Korea ? (or maybe the price of tea in China ?) Well you listen close and you listen good: Kim Il-sung, the “Great Leader” and God-king ruler of North Korea for more than 45 years, studied that there war in Vee-AT-nam ever so closely, because that time the North won.

I wonder if his son—the Dear Leader—also learned anything?

The reason, as they say, is obvious. Since Monday's tiny temblor of a nuclear rip through the earth's crust, all of us here on the Rock have our ears pricked for the drumbeats of war.

Oh piffle! That's a bit melodramatic. Most of us foreigners follow in lockstep with our South Korean hosts: we just don't give a sh hh … okay, we DO care, but we're not running helter-skelter in the streets screaming, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

(And by the way, if it ever does, th ere ain't gonna be much time for screaming.)

The locals' composure is both reassuring (who but a brother would know a brother better?) and unsettling (Abel was smiling when he turned his back on Cain). Yep, folks in these here parts ain't too worried about the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, no. I asked my class today what they thought about nuclear weapons in North Korea and they shot me a look liked I asked how they felt about quasars.

Perhaps something was lost in translation.

Truth be told, a few friends did call me up to ask if it was prudent to book an upcoming flight to Anywhere-But-Here. Like I would know? I wanted to tell them, “Hey, Kim Jong-il is just misunderstood! He wants peace like the rest of us! You wait, you'll see.”

Though secretly I worry that Kim is up in his underground Pyongyang lair—kinda exactly like the one in Team America —picking and eating rose petals while forlornly whispering:

“She loves me? …

Unleash the sea of fire? …

Burn the Yankee pig-dog? …

She loves me NOT?”

No doubt about it, war is nasty business, and there's been quite a lot of it in Asia during the last hundred or so years … thank you very much . Colonial wars and civil wars and a few ‘proxy' wars during that ‘chilly' pseudo-conflict between free-market democracy and communism , the smackdown right here in Korea being the first Big One. Sadly, Pyongyang appears to still be fighting it … and I don't just mean the Korean War. A ‘clash of civilizations' may (or may not) be coming, as the pundits are so fond of warning us, but communism is so yesterday!

But the system up yonder is less communist than … oh, how shall I put this? … freakishly out of synch with the times. Worshipping men as gods went out with Shakespeare! (Oh, alright, but you catch my drift?) In fact, the English (and Danish) kings of Shakespeare's era would turn as green as those ‘salad days' if they saw the deification of the Kim family in the North. You'd probably have to go all the way back to the Pharaohs to see such sycophantic adulation, but even those Princes of Egypt might knock wise with a “How dooooeeees he do it?” if they saw what goes on in the DPRK. Richard II implored, “Let us talk about the death of kings.” Well up in Nork country, Papa Kim Il-sung has been ruling as president from beyond the grave since 1994.

How do you reason with a dead man?

Or is the more relevant question, where DOES North Korea stand?

The Norks ‘ say ' they want the bomb to ‘ deter ' the Americans, and the Americans say the DPRK (oh, that's the official name) are dancing with the Plutonium Genie to threaten their neighbors. (And if they ever get th at Taepodong long-ranger to work, the n threaten the Americans directly).

Who's right?

And does it really matter?

One thing is certain: North Korea sees the world through a glass strangely. I've never read the North's worldview described so comprehensively and succinctly as in Dr. Brian Myers' article “Kim Jong Il Mania” The Depiction of South Korea in Contemporary North Korean Propaganda . Let's take a peek at the government line, shall we? Dr. Myers, who shows us the world through the North's rose-colored glasses, writes:

The race was founded millennia ago by a single progenitor. Since then it has remained as pure as the snow on the motherland's sacred mountain. Though inherently kinder and more virtuous than all others, the race is also capable of a uniquely intense (because uniquely righteous) rage when threatened. The embodiment of the race's hopes is the sun-like Leader, a man of impeccable stock who alone can guide it to its glorious destiny. The enemy is America , a land inhabited by sunken-eyed, big-nosed barbarians. Financed by Jewish capital, yet spouting Christian shibboleths, these wild beasts in human form are bent on destroying the race whose goodness and purity so shame their own conduct. Far from fearing a purgative holy war between the two countries, the sons of the race are ready to lay down their lives for the Leader.

A jaundiced eye indeed, wouldn't you say?

Now I've never slogged through a hail of bullets and mortar shells, never made that trip up the hill, nor taken one in the head for the team. But I have lived with a sociopath, and it haunts. While I have no professional opinion about the mental state of a certain Nork dictator, about a thousand years ago when I was in basic starting my stretch in Uncle Sammy's Army, I did have the displeasure of bunking with a sniveling, running-nosed, bed-wetting, narcissistic shit-storm of a roommate who I'm quite sure was a serial killer in chrysalis form. Based on personal experience, I can say without a shred of doubt that self-righteous megalomaniacs with persecution complexes ain't a whole lotta fun to be around. Whether they're ratting you out to your sergeant for missing curfew (and then sleepwalking through the dream role of I.P. Freely, the Midnight Sailor), or just setting off a few nukes in the neighborhood, you have to keep a jaundiced eye on ‘em.

That's what I'll be doing.

Oh, and my army buddy? Well as soon as I remember his name I'm notifying the authorities back at Camp Butcher Holler. Let them worry about it. The dumb-asses recruited him (okay, yes, they recruited me, too, so who's the dumb-ass. I get it). I fear that as I write this he is out there trolling the interstates of America looking for fresh meat.

Brrrrrr!

Before I forget again, since I forgot before, ‘Hamburger Hill' (the movie) does answer the question why soldiers keep trying to take the hill, even though they know it has no value: to fail is to admit that all those lives were lost in vain.

The Journal of Peace Studies 7(2): 2006, p. 222-223