It's easy to think it can't be done. It's easy to think "we cannot afford to fail." Will we have the political chutzpah to stay inside that tension long enough to be ready when the solution emerges? We are doing that in Korea ... so far.

The forever war
By ARTHUR HERMAN

Last Updated: 5:00 AM, June 25, 2010

Posted: 12:22 AM, June 25, 2010

On June 25, 1950, 90,000 North Korean soldiers backed by 150 Soviet-built T-34 tanks poured across the border into South Korea. The Cold War had suddenly turned hot, and America found itself drawn into the longest war in its history.

Vietnam used to claim that dubious title. Now it's Afghanistan. But the surprise communist invasion 60 years ago today began a Korean war that eventually saw an armistice but still no peace treaty.

Indeed, since major fighting stopped in 1953, more than 90 Americans and 300 South Korean soldiers have been killed in clashes along the DMZ barbed wire between North and South Korea -- in addition to the 46 ROK sailors killed by a North Korean torpedo in March.

That summer of 1950 tested America's commitment to the cause of freedom as never before, not even in World War II. There was no Pearl Harbor, and no American interests at stake in Korea but one: that other peoples should never be enslaved against their will.

The Soviet-backed invasion came just five years after V-J Day. It was the first serious test of America's post-World War II strength of will and its new strategy of containing communism. Would America step up to protect an impoverished nation so far from any vital shore? Many feared the Truman administration, with its attention focused on Europe, would not.

They were wrong. President Harry Truman got off a plane in Washington and immediately agreed to swift action to save South Korea. He had been thinking about Hitler and Mussolini on the plane, Truman said; this time, the totalitarians would not get away with it. America would send in troops at once.

The problem was, there were no troops -- or very few. In 1945, America had spent $50 billion on defense, in 1950 $5 billion. Its 8.25 million-strong military had shrunk to less than 600,000, most of them still in Europe. The Eighth Army's four undermanned, underequipped divisions would somehow have to stem the massive communist tide, as Gen. Walton Walker fed his troops in piecemeal.

The shortage of manpower also forced the integration of African-Americans into front-line combat units. Indeed, the all-black 24th Regimental Combat Team scored the first American success, on July 20 at Yochen, where Lt. William Bussey became the war's first African-American Silver Star.

By the end of July, 94,000 US and South Korean troops were clinging to a narrow perimeter around Pusan, at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. One infantryman from the 34th Regiment remembered: "We stacked our dead around us for protection." Gen. Walker told his men there was no retreat, because there was nowhere to go. "We must fight to the end." If they had to die, he said, "at least we die together."

But they held on, while waves of carrier-borne Navy planes pounded the sputtering North Korean attack. By now, Walker's men were joined by the British, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders of the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade, as Truman's decision to seek support from the United Nations began to kick in -- and nations America had liberated in World War II, like Greece and France, stepped up in her support.

To relieve Pusan and reverse the war's course, Gen. Douglas MacArthur launched his dramatic amphibious landing at Inchon on Sept. 15, and the long slow slog of retaking South Korea began.

For a year and a half, the fighting in Korea would range like a yo-yo up and down the peninsula. When MacArthur's victorious forces pushed too close to the Chinese border, communist China entered the war and pushed the Americans down the peninsula again. After months of more slaughter came stalemate.

Finally, when the Soviets learned that Truman's successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, was ready to use nuclear weapons to secure victory, they forced North Korea to the negotiating table. The endless truce was the result.

The war saw plenty of American mistakes. Our fighting men were undersupplied and overstretched. Some broke and ran, even as many more fought like heroes.

Korea also set the precedent for formally undeclared wars, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, wars that divided more than united public opinion, and for relying on the UN and international coalitions to lend moral support to US military muscle -- with steadily diminishing returns over time.

But above all Korea had shown that America would stand by its commitments, even through a seething maze of obstacles and setbacks. Korea was the worst possible place for a war, one Truman advisor, Averell Harriman, observed; but "no weakness of purpose here." It's a powerful lesson for another worst possible place for a war, Afghanistan, 60 years later.

The Berlin Wall is gone, but the DMZ on the 38th parallel remains, the dividing line between totalitarianism and freedom, between the Stalinist darkness of North Korea and prosperous and open society of South Korea. Thirty-six thousand Americans gave their lives to establish it, and 28,000 Americans are holding it there still.

Many more would die trying to hold a similar line in Vietnam, and still others in Iraq and today Afghanistan. America learned from the harrowing experience of Korea that US weakness and retreat is not an option -- not just for us but the rest of the world.

Arthur Herman's most recent book is "Gandhi and Churchill."
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