A ‘forgotten,’ nasty war must be remembered
By: By MICHAEL STETZ, SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE
05/31/2010

JOHN GIBBINS / UNION-TRIBUNE

Korean War veteran and former FBI agent Dan Bledsoe, 79, was a 19-year-old Marine reservist when he was sent overseas to fight in Korea.

Dan Bledsoe was 19 when he went to fight in the Korean War. A Marine, he was in the thick of several battles, including the one at Chosin Reservoir, where temperatures plunged to 40 below.

To this day, Bledsoe’s feet and hands suffer because of the exposure. They swell. They hurt. His toenails mysteriously rot.

The cold?

“To eat, we used our bayonets to chip away at our frozen C-rations,” he said.

It’s Memorial Day weekend and there’s more to do than just barbecue burgers, hit the beach or knock back cold ones.

How about we think of Bledsoe, of what he and others did 60 years ago this year, rescuing South Korea from the North’s invasion.

They saved a nation.

North Korea is at it again, though. South Korea says the North sunk one of its navy ships in March, sending 46 sailors to their deaths. The South is ramping up military drills. It’s seeking sanctions and cutting off ties to the North.

Bledsoe, 79, who lives in Mount Helix, follows the news closely. North Korea is a mess, he said. It’s bound to implode. It treats its people horribly. It’s led by one of the more nasty and bizarre leaders in the world, Kim Jong Il, and is toying with nuclear weapons.

But think of this: If not for our intervention, the whole peninsula likely would be under North Korea’s rule today.

Instead, a free and prosperous South Korea exists. Once poor and undeveloped, the nation has been transformed into an industrialized powerhouse. It’s now one of the world’s top 20 economies.

Despite that, the Korean War is sometimes called “The Forgotten War,” because it followed so closely toWorld War II and came before the Vietnam War.

We should not forget.

Bledsoe and his fellow fighters deserve some serious props. (My dad: a Korean War veteran. You go, Dad!)

The United States paid a big price to preserve the South. More than 36,000 Americans died in theater during the three-year war.

Bledsoe wanted to serve. He wanted to fight. He was certain the United States was doing the right thing. South Korea had no real military at the time. It didn’t have a prayer.

The United States wasn’t in the best shape to fight a war, either. The country was war weary — five years removed from the end of World War II. President Harry Truman was considering eliminating the Marines.

A Marine reservist who grew up in San Francisco, Bledsoe got called up soon after the conflict started in 1950.

The only Marine training he had done was a couple of two-week summer camps at Camp Pendleton when he was in high school.

A scout sniper, he got a taste of war quickly. He was a part of the famed Inchon invasion, a daring move that put Marines behind enemy lines, allowing them to cut off the North Korea supply chain.

He landed in the fourth wave. The tides were 30 feet deep. The enemy shelled them with artillery.

Two days later, Bledsoe met the enemy — up close. He and three other Marines were sent out to search for two missing Marines. They found one, with a bullet in his head.

Still patrolling, they approached a field. Taking cover from a creek bank, they noticed it was full of North Korean soldiers. The Marines were soon spotted.

Bledsoe’s gunnery sergeant, a World War II veteran, told Bledsoe and the others that they had to do something crazy, something that the enemy would never expect: Charge them.

He ordered the Marines to fix bayonets. He told them to yell and scream and rush at them and kill them.

Bledsoe did. It was all a haze, he said. When he ran out of bullets, he used his rifle as a club. The attack somehow worked. The enemy ran off.

Afterward, exhausted and winded, Bledsoe looked at his uniform. It was covered in blood. He thought he had been shot or stabbed. He wasn’t. It was all enemy blood.

The next day, a Marine patrol went to the site to investigate. It counted 22 enemy dead.

After the war, Bledsoe married, raised two children and became an FBI agent. He’s now retired and a widower.

He returned to Korea once, in 1980, as part of a program that sends veterans back. He was amazed at how much more developed it had become.

It was not the godforsaken place he had remembered. It was vibrant. And peaceful.

That’s something he would hate to see shattered.

“War would be a losing proposition — for both sides.”

He would know.