Re: 50 years ago today - 1 Aug 1950

[<RonaldS842@aol.com>]

In a message dated 8/1/00 11:55:56 AM, ede@oio.net writes:

<< U.S. Army casualties from June 25 through July 31, 1950 totaled 6003: 
1,884 

KIA, 2,695 WIA, 523 MIA and 901 reported captured.  Of these more than half 

of these were from the 24th Infantry Division — 3,610.

 >>

Hi Ed-

   I have been following your daily report with a lot of interest. I wish, 
however, you would add a few personal touches, maybe pertinent stories, 
humor, and a little more narrative. If you are planning on using this stuff 
to write another book this kind of approach would actually help.
   Well, enough of my unsolicited advice :-)
Your remarks this morning brought on a little melancholy, almost brought 
tears to these old eyes. Thinking about a lot of our friends who weren't 
given the opportunity to grow to adulthood, get married, raise a family, 
etc., etc. I'm thinking it must have been a Hell of a job for a platoon 
leader to keep those kids motivated to face death 24 hours a day.  And I'm 
thinking, what did they die for. To keep the world save for democracy? Yeh. 
And I was a gung ho kid in those days.
   I'm not a big believer in conspiracy theory but I keep a nagging suspicion 
of what the Korean War was all about.
   When I went to "spy" school we learned Chinese and Russian and not one 
word of Korean. And throughout the war I had a lot of interplay with the 
Russians and Chinese and none with the Koreans.
   A book was written after the war about the fact that the Korean war was 
actually about the upcoming and imminent war with USSR and that would be an 
atomic war. Korea was a warm-up game, a ruse.  Do you know the book? I can 
give you dozens of examples of this but you know them all. 
   It would make me sad to know we lost all those lives in a practise game.

Ronald D. Schultz
Moraga, CA