Just outside Quantico, Virginia the National Museum of the Marine Corps sits amid rolling hills off Route 95. Among its many exhibits tracing the history of the Corps is a depiction of several Marines hunkered down in the snows of North Korea overlooking the 4,000-foot high Toktong Pass near the Chosin Reservoir. The thermostat is kept at a meat locker temperature. The curators of the museum try to convey to the visitor something of what it was like to fight a determined enemy that outnumbered you ten-to-one while struggling just to survive the cruel sub-zero colds of the Asian mountains.
In late November through December 1950, 12,000 Marines of the First U.S. Marine Division and 2,500 G.I.s in a regimental combat team of the Army’s 7th Division faced just such a challenge as over 70,000 Chinese infantrymen mercilessly attacked them in the hills and gullies around the frozen man-made lake. As the Winter Olympics have concluded in PyeongChang, the chatter in the media has been the joining of North and South Korea for at least a symbolic re-unification that merely belies the deep division of the country between the prosperous South and starving slave-state North. One looks at the portly Kim Jong Un, poised to possibly meet with President Trump in May, and wonders how such a cruel despot could hold the lives of 23 million tortured, malnourished, terrorized souls in his hands.
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