Quotation 30: "I was with the French at Chipyong-ni. They were superb soldiers, and they were all volunteers. Everyone of them was in Korea because he wanted to be there. They were led by a man named Monclar, a general in the French army who had taken a reduction in rank just to lead the battalion to Korea. Monclar was an old man by then, but he was a fighter. He spoke pretty good English, and once when we were in the perimeter at Chipyon he overheard some of the guys griping about having to be in Korea. 'What are we doing here anyway?' That kind of thing. Monclar walked right up to these guys and said, 'Just a minute. This is the first time in five thousand years of recorded civilization that there has ever been an international organization to help preserve the peace. This is the first time an international army has fought to maintain law and order. If civilization lasts another five thousand years, that will not change the fact that this is the first time it's ever been done. And you people are part of it. And you should be honored to be part of it.' And then he turned on his heel and walked away.

Monclar believed totally in the concept of the United Nations, and what the UN was doing in Korea. That's why he was there. But I think a lot of those French soldiers he had under him were old Foreign Legion types. They just wanted to be in a war. It didn't really matter what the cause was they were fighting for, just so long as they were fighting. You have people like that. They get an excitement out of war that they can't get anywhere else."

(Source: Rudy Tomedi. No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War. New York: John Wiley, 1993: 145 )

Question for Quotation 30: Why did Monclair consider the Korean War unusual? Research what was happening in 1950 in French – ruled Vietnam. Compare the French struggle in Vietnam and Indochina to the Korean War. How were they similar and different?

2nd Narrator: For many troops, their most vivid memory of the Korean War was the cold. James Brady, looking back on his experiences, entitled his memoirs, The Coldest War. But fighting in the summer time had its own unbearable memories:
 

Quotation 31: "No one I knew who had been there long enough missed the winter, regretted the cold. But this fighting in the heat possessed its own dimension of horror. You could see the wounds, see what killed people, the explicit manner of death and injury: a leg severed at the knee, a mangled arm, how startlingly white a man's ribs looked sticking out from under a flak jacket, pink at the splintered ends with little bits of meat attached. I could see what my own legs looked like, and the backs of my hands, when I came down from Yoke peppered with rock and grit and sharp nails.

All winter you were so muffled in clothes, layers and layers, swaddled against the cold, that a man could be all shot to pieces, literally sieved, but unless you were a corpsman you didn't have to look at the broken bones and the torn flesh and see blood pulsing from cut arteries and veins. The bodies were just as hurt, just as broken, but it happened under a couple of pairs of pants and an oversized parka. Men died more neatly in winter, modestly covered instead of naked and obscenely ripped apart. Those heavy clothes gave death a certain muffled discretion. A man could die in decency."

(Source: James Brady. The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea. New York: Pocket Books, 1990: 258)









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