BY PETER BRONSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
What would Walter Norris think of a gaudy plastic palace like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland? If he could see us now, what would that 1950s kid Marine think of Americans who can remember all the words to "When I'm 64" by the Beatles, but can't remember the war that killed him when he was only 18?
"We have been in combat 16 straight days now," he wrote home from Korea. "Slowly we are reaching the 38th parallel again. We are fighting the Chinese now and they are harder to fight. They are smart people. They have tunnels going through all these mountains . . ."
His letter is a telegram from the past. It was among thousands sent home by soldiers who fought in Korea from June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953. It will be among dozens of letters from war veterans that will appear on a war memorial in Columbus, being dedicated on Aug. 21.
At about the same time men like Walter were dying in the mud, snow and frozen foxholes of Korea, a new generation was being born -- baby boomers like me.
And when our scorecard is added up someday, my guess is that the boomers will be a bust. The monuments we're leaving behind are mostly like the one in Cleveland.
There's Jimi Hendrix's leather jacket. A furry suit Elvis wore for an album cover. John Lennon's silk chartreuse mock military uniform from "Magical Mystery Tour" and other garish concert costumes hang on manikins like a wax museum without the wax. A little Cub Scout shirt, decorated in arrow points earned by Doors singer Jim Morrison, hanges forlorn in a glass case, surrounded by a vague haze of pointless death that clings to my generation's "heroes."
Can anyone say what Jimi and Jim and Janice and all the others died for, exactly? They didn't die for freedom -- they died from it, killed by an overdose of wanton self indulgence.
That's nothing to memorialize. Yet millions line up like concert crowds to file past guitar picks and drumsticks like dutiful mourners visiting the tomb of their lost youth. Grandparents drag young children past drug-drenched attic relics that look as if they belong on a curb in a shabby pile of musty cardboard boxes, waiting for a Salvation Army truck.
Look, there's Mick Jagger's lace dress and platform shoes.
A few blocks away in downtown Cleveland, a spectacular war memorial on the public square has precisely one visitor -- a street bum using it for his living room and who knows what else.
Veterans and their families will march and salute flags and cry for fallen comrades when the Columbus memorial is dedicated in August. But after that, it will probably recede into the concrete background, another marble and bronze ornament on the Capitol landscape, something to walk past.
I guess that's human nature. We'd rather remember anti-war protest songs than the men who died to make protests possible. The soundtrack is better than the dated movie. But now and then, we need to say that's not the way it should be -- that one name followed by "KIA," for killed in action, is a greater gift to us than all of the garage-sale artifacts in a Museum of Modern Middleage Nostalgia.
A few days after I visited the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame, I went to a meeting of the Cincinnati Chapter Korean War Veterans of America, at American Legion Post 513. About 20 vets were there.
The tattoos are blurred now, but the memories are still bayonet sharp. So I asked why it's so important to remember Korea.
There was a silence. Then the first man answered slowly, his words like a bitter, resigned curse at those who have to ask:
"There are 54,000 reasons," Bill Elrod said. To be exact, 54,246 killed, 103,000 wounded and 8,179 MIAs.
There have been worse wars and less costly wars, but this is the time of year when Korean vets remember what the rest of us don't -- how a war-weary nation looked the other way, then never looked back. So . . .
"We need to remember because Korea was the first war where the politicians took over from the generals, the same way they did later in Vietnam," said Albert Holt.
Roy Miller saw the POWs returned by the North Koreans, and the shape they were in. "This is something that you could never forget," he says.
He worries that the younger generation is not learning about the sacrifices that were made on their behalf. "The history books are not telling the truth."
His reason to remember: Walter Norris and all the others like him who died in Korea and other wars so that the rest of us would be free to forget the high price of liberty.
Eighteen days before he was killed, Walter wrote his last letter. "Hi everyone," it began. "I'm a company runner now, a good job because it's a lot safer. I wish you all wouldn't worry so much about me . . ."
The sad truth is that we don't worry about you much at all anymore.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
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