Honoring Those Who Paid the Price: Forgotten Voices from the Korean War

In December 1950 Donald Hamilton of Solsberry. Indiana, a medic with the Eighth Army's Seventh Division became trapped with the rest of his comrades under fierce onslaught by Chinese troops at the Chosin Reservoir. As Hamilton prepared to escape to safety, he heard a fellow soldier scream for help. Disregarding a friend's plea not to return. Hamilton went back to offer aid. He was never seen again. For many years afterward Donald's father. Oval Hamilton, kept hoping that his son was alive, telling army officials, "Send me just one bone of my son, and I'll accept his death." On the day before Oval Hamilton's death at age ninety-six, be told his granddaughter, "Maybe Donald will get to come home before I die." The name of Donald Hamilton is one of the 927 Hoosiers honored at the state's Korean War memorial in Indianapolis for giving their lives during the Asian conflict. The story of those who died, those who served, and the loved ones back home who struggled to understand the horrors of war are examined in "Honoring Those Who Paid the Price": Forgotten Voices from the Korean War For the book, supported by a Clio Grant from the Indiana Historical Society, author Randy K. Mills personally interviewed a number of Hoosier veterans of the war, reviewed letters from veterans to loved ones back home, perused local and national media accounts, and consulted definitive historical studies about the conflict that killed approximately 54,000 Americans. At the demographic heart of the country in the 1940s and 1950s. Indiana, Mills notes, stands as a significant case study for understanding how the Korean War affected the American people. The complex struggle that was Korea has through the years earned a status as the "forgotten war," as the United States questioned its necessity and its uncertain accomplishments. Many Korean veterans returned home only to remain silent for many years about their experiences. But in his interviews with Indiana veterans of the war, Mills discovered that "all possessed a vivid memory, and the details they recalled were often connected to powerful emotions as well." "Honoring Those Who Paid the Price" includes details on the continually evolving conflict. ls explores America's shock and woeful lack of preparation for the war and the heroic defense by a post-World War II occupation force from Japan at the southeast Korean seaport of Pusan, the successful landing at Inchon planned and executed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and the shocking introduction of a half million troops by China. Finally stopping the Chinese at the thirty-eighth parallel, American troops and their United Nations allies fought a stalemate as negotiations dragged on to end the war, which finally ended in July 1953 with a truce. The book examines each phase of the war by relating significant examples of Hoosier involvement during each period. "It is hoped that these verbal snapshots of the war," Mills writes in the book's introduction, "convey a larger picture -- a rich collage of Indiana and her citizens during the Korean War." Book jacket.