Koreans, veterans mark war's 60th anniversary

Shortly after invading troops began pouring into South Korea on the morning of June 25, 1950, 17-year-old John Sehejung Ha was with his family at their home in Seoul.

Gunfire shattered the window through which they were peering, wounding his grandmother in the head. She fell a few feet from where he stood.

Sixty years after the beginning of a war that claimed more than 3 million civilian and Korean military lives, as well as 37,000 Americans, many U.S. veterans and Korean survivors see the Korean War as a defining moment in their lives, one they regard with varying degrees of pride and anguish, reverence and resignation.

"It was the most traumatic moment of my life," said Ha, 77, of Plainview.

Ha is among thousands of area residents who will commemorate what many call "the forgotten war" this week with wreath-layings, speeches, celebratory dinners or - for Ha and about a dozen U.S. veterans of the war - a trip to the South Korean battlefields of their youth.

Sal Scarlato, 77, a Marine Corps veteran from Hauppauge, will be traveling in Ha's group, even though a wartime trauma in Korea left him with chronic nightmares.

Communist soldiers had breached the trenches where he was stationed shortly after his April 1952 arrival in Korea, and he found himself face-to-face with a Chinese fighter. Scarlato, who dropped his rifle in panic, managed to take the knife from the soldier and stab him repeatedly. The knife - a 6-inch blade with an eagle's-head haft - hangs on a wall in his basement.

"It's different when you kill someone with your hands," Scarlato said. "You feel like a murderer."

Korean families were split forever, some by differing ideology, some by forced conscriptions, some by the vicissitudes of Korea's post-World War II division between communist North and pro-Western South. It ended with an armistice in July 1953, with the country remaining divided to this day.

"It was brother against brother," said Sok Kang, 77, of Flushing, president of the Korean Veterans Association of New York, who fought in the South Korean army, had a cousin conscripted by the North and never again heard from a grandmother who tried to return to her home in the North to retrieve personal property.

"This didn't just happen to my family," he said. "This happened to most Korean families."

Many of Long Island's estimated 14,000 Korean-Americans say the stability provided by America during and since the war - some 28,500 U.S. troops remain stationed in South Korea today - allowed their once-ravaged homeland to develop into the world's 15th-largest economy.

Jia Lim, a South Korean filmmaker who is making a documentary on the war, said this stability incubated an educated and affluent middle class of Koreans now living on both sides of the Pacific.

"This is very important history, because without their sacrifice, our country would not exist," Lim, who is based in Manhattan, said of American GIs.

"I think Koreans everywhere appreciate what they did," said Dr. Jung Oh, 61, a West Islip physician who immigrated in 1976 and who helped raise more than $20,000 to help pay the travel costs of the group of U.S. veterans visiting South Korea.

Last Friday, with the aroma of Korean barbecue wafting in the breeze, members of the Korean community honored U.S. veterans with a sunset ceremony and a picnic dinner in Hauppauge.

"Your sacrifice to defend our motherland will never be forgotten," said Kang, one of several speakers who addressed the gathering at the Korean War memorial outside the H. Lee Dennison county building.

Many of the veterans who attended said the Korean War was a necessary sacrifice to stop the spread of communism and to give a beleaguered people a chance at a better life.

"I believed in the domino theory even then," said Bob Auletti, 77, of Patchogue. "After seeing how the Koreans rebuilt their country into the economic power it is today, the war was not in vain."