Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

WASHINGTON — Looking at those tight-knit squares of goose-stepping North Korean troops on TV, you wonder if they’re the same ones every time.

Do they hang out at some special base going through their paces day after day so they’ll be picture perfect whenever called on to show off the North’s military might? Presumably analysts at the National Security Agency have been busy studying their faces to see if these highly trained troops are members of elite units reserved for such grand occasions.

And what about those missiles and artillery pieces the North loves to show off? Do they keep them painted and polished in a garage somewhere, ready to drag out for the next ceremony? We assume the ones we see on TV are just for stage effect. Surely they’re carrying nothing lethal and are not ready for launching while the real missiles are hidden at or near the North’s launch sites, primed for the next testing.

Such random thoughts filtered through my jet-lagged mind as the North Korean media repeated the usual claims of “great victory” that they’ve been proclaiming ever since the signing on July 27, 1953, of the armistice that ended the Korean War.

That big lie was all over the North Korean media on the 60th anniversary last weekend as thousands of troops, accompanied by all those tanks and missiles, paraded through Pyongyang. Oh yes, outdated MiG fighters also flew above the scene, further evidence of the amazing defeat the North Koreans had inflicted on the U.S. and South Koreans in three years, one month and two days of horrific fighting that began with “Great Leader” Kim Il-Sung ordering his troops to invade the South on June 25, 1950.

“Victory Day in the Fatherland Liberation War” was the name of the whole show, a holiday that’s intended as much to buttress the North’s power elite before their own people as to impress the outside world.

In its own way, however, the anniversary was as significant here in Washington as in Pyongyang. There were no parades, no displays of military might, but President Obama spoke for 20 minutes beside the Korean War memorial on the national mall to show the abiding U.S. commitment to South Korea.

Gen. Paik Sun-Yup, 93, who rose from lieutenant to four-star general and leader of South Korean forces in the Korean War, was on the dais — a symbol of South Korea’s sacrifice and role in what’s still called America’s “forgotten war.”

Obama described the outcome as a “forgotten victory” — a response to the absurd claims that North Korea has been making ever since the truce was signed in Panmunjom and the North Korean media began calling it a “surrender” by the U.S., South Korea and their U.N. allies.

At the memorial, I saw scores of aging veterans, new Korean War medallions draped around their necks, straining to hear Obama’s thanks along with his carefully scripted remark that the veterans when they got home had discovered Americans were “tired of war” and wanted “to forget, to move on.” You veterans, he said, “deserved better.” The outcome was “a victory,” he said, “no tie,” as historians like to believe.

As for the show in Pyongyang, one would never have imagined the dire state of North Korea’s economy to judge by the size of a celebration that spared no expense to show the North’s power. North Korea was just as interested, moreover, in demonstrating that its old Korean War ally, China, was still very much on its side.

Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency indicated how badly North Korea still needs China’s support. “The internationalist example set by the Chinese People’s Volunteers in the war recorded a shining page in the history of the DPRK and China,” said KCNA, “and people will always remember this.”

The memorial in Washington, meticulously planned, was modest in comparison, but the rhetoric was strong. U.S. Representative Charlie Rangel, one of four Korean War veterans in Congress, set the tone with his reminder of the hardships and horrors of the war and its place in U.S. history. He also reminded people that 8,000 U.S. soldiers, marines and airmen remain among the missing.

One veteran talked of the personal tragedy of the disappearance of his brother, a marine who was captured during the marines’ retreat from the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea in the harsh winter of 1950.

Nobody went into detail on the topic of those “missing in action,” but a new Kindle e-book “American Trophies: How US POWs Were Surrendered to North Korea, China, and Russia by Washington’s “Cynical Attitude,” by POW expert John Zimmerlee and investigative historian Mark Sauter, looks into the whole sad story.

“We are running out of time to solve these mysteries,” said Zimmerlee, whose aviator father is still missing from the war. “Online sleuths may be able to find what the Pentagon and CIA cannot.”

  about the ‘Forgotten War’, East and West, Gen. Paik Sun-Yup, Kim Il-Sung, Panmunjom, Strong feelings