This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

by T.R. Fehrenbach

Everywhere Matt Ridgway went, however, he found the same question in men’s minds: What the hell are we doing in this godforsaken place? If men had been told, Destroy the evil of Bolshevism, they might have understood. But they did not understand why the line must be held or why the Taehan Minkuk—that miserable, stinking, undemocratic country—must be protected. The question itself never concerned Matt Ridgway. At the age of fifty-six, more than thirty years a centurion, to him the answer was simple. The loyalty he gave, and expected, precluded the slightest questioning of orders. This he said. But to a generation brought up to hold some loyalties lightly, and to question many things, this was not enough. To these men Ridgway said: The real issues are whether the power of Western Civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism; whether the rule of men who shoot their prisoners, enslave their citizens, and deride the dignity of man, shall displace the rule of those to whom the individual and his individual rights are sacred; whether we are to survive with God’s hand to guide and lead us, or to perish in the dead existence of a Godless world.

These themes echo even today with similar generational questions.