My father fought in this war, came in with the main U.N. invasion, fought in North Korea before being shot a couple times and sitting out the rest in a hospital

My father fought in this war, came in with the main U.N. invasion, fought in North Korea before being shot a couple times and sitting out the rest in a hospital in Japan trying to beat a new found morphine addiction. He very rarely talks about his time there, but pictures of modern South Korea make him stop in his tracks. My wife is Korean, and her father and his brother were the only surviving family members from their side. Orphaned at 8 or 9, my father-in-law remembers very fondly American soldiers volunteering time to come to the orphanage and play with the kids, bring them candy, whatever. It's not entirely impossible that my father may have been one of those soldiers giving my father-in-law chocolate. When my wife and I announced our engagement, my father-in-law felt it was deeply appropriate for the son of one of those soldiers who may have saved his life to marry one of his daughters. If you want to better understand that kind of bond, I recommend watching this documentary on a reunion between a Korean orphan and her Turkish soldier guardian (the Allies were a U.N. force and Turkey was a major contributor of troops). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98KBGvZymMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98KBGvZymMA Sometime during the war, in order to slow the southward advancing Communist forces, all of the bridges crossing the numerous rivers in South Korea were destroyed, leaving hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees to crawl over wreckage and ford rivers on foot. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/Flight_of_Refugees_Across_Wrecked_Bridge_1950.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/Flight_of_Ref... So rapidly and completely displaced were people, and so decimated the country had been, that families who were separated in the rush away from the war often never found their relatives again. In the 1980s a short run of shows trying to reconnect families swept the nation as people desperately tried to remember the names and faces of their long-lost, hopefully still living, relatives. At one point the show ran for 13 hours a day. Over 10,000 families were reunited -- decades after the war had ceased. http://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/18/world/war-scattered-korean-kin-find-their-kin-at-last.html http://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/18/world/war-scattered-korean... http://www.koreabang.com/2013/pictures/photos-in-1983-all-of-korea-was-crying.html http://www.koreabang.com/2013/pictures/photos-in-1983-all-of...