Bud Farell in the bomb bay - Korean War

President Harry Truman preposterously called the bitter three-year conflict "a police action," veterans groups are planning quiet ceremonies, but Korea has come to be regarded as a forgotten conflict — tucked in between World War II, which united a nation in a just cause, and Vietnam, which tore the same nation asunder. In China, which lost, according to some estimates, over 1 million soldiers during the Korean war, there is barely a nod of remembrance. But right now, along the southern side of the DMZ, South Korean troops are assembling loudspeakers and large video screens, tools they again intend to use to wage psychological warfare against the soldiers on the other side. The South will remind them just how awful their government is and just how good life on the southern side is.

Commemorations of the other conflicts that have shaped our world often involve attempts at reconciliation. They bring together former allies and former enemies to pay their joint respects. Germans and Americans travel to Normandy each June to mark the invasion that changed the course of World War II in Europe. When the doves are released each Aug. 6 in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, Americans are always present. The past is remembered, but such occasions also signal that the world has changed for the better.

The price of such war without end is steep, and frequently borne by ordinary people. There are no good statistics on how many family members were separated from 1950 to 1953, but South Korean academics have conservatively estimated about 1 million. During the years of South Korea's conciliatory "sunshine policy," in place from 1998 to 2007, the governments permitted reunions of separated families. Even last year, the three Suh children were able to gather at a reunion center set up at North Korea's Mount Kumgang. They spoke of their father. They spoke a bit about their lives on the two sides of the DMZ. Then they parted again, after a meeting that, for Se Jun, had been more painful than joyous. "It made me miss them even more," she says quietly.

One of our own Korean war veterans' story: Bud Farrell of the 19th Bomb Group