Always Faithful – Part I: The Unfinished War
Staff writer and Reconnaissance Marine Byron Owen was recently in Seoul, Korea. In this three-part series, he shares lessons from his visit — on a war that never truly ended, the Marines who turned it around, and a seventy-year promise still being kept today. It begins with a simple morning run.
Always Faithful series: Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3
The sun was already climbing over Seoul when I stepped out of my hotel and started running toward the river. It was late July, hot and humid, and the city was beginning to wake up around me. Seoul sprawled in every direction, a dense collection of glass towers, apartment buildings, ancient palaces, and tree-covered mountains that rose unexpectedly between them. I followed the water toward Gyeongbokgung Palace, running beneath bridges and along paths cut through the center of a city that nearly ten million people call home.
I wasn't alone for long. Runners moved in both directions along the path. People walked beside the water or stopped at the exercise stations scattered through the parks. Small groups of elderly Koreans stood together beneath the trees, moving slowly through a series of synchronized exercises that looked something like tai chi. Others stretched, lifted weights, or simply walked. I have been coming to Korea for years, but the level of activity still caught my attention. It seemed like half the city had decided to work out before breakfast.
A few miles into the run, I found a marathon.
The streets were packed with runners and spectators, music played somewhere ahead of me, and a smiling pink cartoon creature appeared on signs and banners throughout the course. I had seen him around Seoul before without giving him much thought. He had enormous eyes, a horn on his head, and the permanent smile of something designed to sell stuffed animals to children. His name was Haechi, and despite appearances, he was supposed to be protecting the city.
Haechi has been associated with Seoul for centuries. The mythical creature traditionally represented justice and was believed to protect people from fire and other disasters. Stone versions still stand outside some of Korea's palaces and important buildings, considerably more intimidating than the modern cartoon version adopted by the Seoul Metropolitan Government. Somewhere along the way, the ancient guardian had been given bright colors, a friendly face, and a career as the city's mascot.
I stopped and took a picture with him.
It was difficult to reconcile the idea of Seoul needing a guardian with the city around me that morning. South Korea is one of the most prosperous and technologically advanced countries in the world. Seoul is clean, safe, and relentlessly modern. The people I passed were friendly. Families walked through the parks. Elderly men and women exercised beneath the trees. Thousands of runners were spending their morning pushing themselves through the streets while a cartoon guardian smiled at them from the side of the course.
The following day, I saw a different side of the city.
Korean flags lined the streets near the palace. Large photographs showed soldiers, refugees, and scenes from the Korean War. Some of the images were familiar, others were not. The crowds that gathered around them were older and more serious than the runners I had seen the morning before. I arrived in Seoul during the anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement, signed on July 27, 1953. The agreement brought the fighting to an end after three years of war and millions of casualties, but it did not end the war itself. No peace treaty was ever signed.
Once I started looking, evidence of that unfinished war was everywhere.
Blue and white civil-defense signs identify emergency shelters throughout the city. They are easy to overlook among the thousands of other signs competing for attention in Seoul, but once you recognize them, you begin seeing them everywhere. Some point toward subway stations. Others lead underground into large commercial spaces filled with restaurants and stores. People shop there, eat lunch, and walk through them on their way to work. In an emergency, those same spaces can become shelters for the population above.
The contrast is easy to miss. Seoul is a city of skyscrapers, high-speed trains, crowded baseball stadiums, coffee shops, and some of the most advanced technology in the world. Beneath it sits an infrastructure designed, at least in part, around the possibility that artillery, missiles, or aircraft could once again threaten the city.
The shelters are not historical monuments. They remain part of the city because the Korean War never formally ended. Less than forty miles north of Seoul sits the Demilitarized Zone, and beyond it a North Korean military that has spent more than seventy years preparing for the possibility that the fighting might begin again.
On June 25, 1950, it did.
The Fall of Seoul
The North Korean invasion came with little warning. More than 75,000 soldiers from the Korean People's Army crossed the 38th Parallel before dawn, supported by Soviet-built tanks, artillery, and aircraft that the South Korean military was poorly equipped to stop. The Republic of Korea had existed for less than two years. Its army had no tanks, limited heavy weapons, and almost no ability to slow the armored columns moving south toward Seoul.
Three days later, the city fell.
The collapse continued through the summer. The United States rushed troops into Korea from occupation duty in Japan, but they initially proved no more successful at stopping the North Korean advance. U.S. and South Korean units fought a series of delaying actions as they withdrew south, trading ground for time while reinforcements and equipment flowed into the peninsula. Behind them, hundreds of thousands of Korean civilians fled the fighting with whatever they could carry.
Entire families crowded the roads south. Parents carried children on their backs or pulled them along by the hand, while carts and wagons carried the elderly and whatever possessions people had managed to save. Some families fled before the fighting reached their homes, while others escaped through the destruction it left behind. The chaos separated children from their parents and families from one another, while thousands more lost the people they loved to the violence moving steadily down the peninsula.
By August, North Korean forces had driven the South Korean Army and its allies almost the entire length of the country. The civilian population had retreated with them, flooding into the shrinking patch of territory that remained under South Korean control. Refugees crowded the roads, villages, and cities around the southeastern port of Pusan while the armies fought desperately along a defensive line that became known as the Pusan Perimeter. Behind that line sat the last major port available to bring reinforcements and supplies into the fight, along with a civilian population that had nowhere farther south to run.
The Pusan Perimeter became a desperate holding action. American, South Korean, and other United Nations forces fought to keep the North Koreans from reaching the port while ships unloaded the men, tanks, ammunition, and supplies needed to keep them in the war. If Pusan fell, there was no meaningful position left to defend. The Republic of Korea was in real danger of disappearing less than two years after it had been created.
The answer would come from the sea.
Continue the series → Always Faithful: Part II
Full series: Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3
Byron Owen is a Reconnaissance Marine with tours as both a platoon commander and commanding officer at the elite 1st Force Reconnaissance Company. He also had the honor of commanding several intelligence and cyber units to include Cyberspace Warfare Task Group 1, and 3d Radio Battalion. He writes about leadership at www.rucksackleadership.com, information warfare at keyterraincyber.com, and is the author of the upcoming book Bury my Heart in Baghdad.
