By early afternoon Smith gave the order to retreat, and when he did many of his soldiers ran, throwing away their weapons. Smith himself had to leave behind his dead and wounded. The Korean War had started. Unlike Vietnam in the next decade, it did not come back to America live and in color on television. The nation was not yet wired, and Korea, so distant, the names of its towns so alien, did not lend itself to radio coverage, as did the great war that had preceded it. The best reporting in Korea was done by daily journalists, who caught its remarkable drama, heroism, and pathos for a nation
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