The Korean War Mixed Graves

(In lieu of an abstract) The Korean War (1950-1953) was a world-historical event, and its legacies continue to reverberate in today’s world. However, the war was not a single conflict but rather a combination of several different kinds of war. Above all, it was a civil war fought between two mutually negating postcolonial political forces, each of which, through the negation, aspired to build a common, singular, and united modern nation-state worthy of the name. This civil war also had a strong element of being a war against society, involving relentless assault against the civilian population. In this context, the enmity and violence of the larger political world seeped deep into the intimate communal space and tore apart the latter’s moral integrity.Seen from a different angle, the Korean War was also part of a global conflict waged between two bifurcating international forces with different visions of modernity, which we commonly call the Cold War. The weltbürgerkrieg (global war) had a strong element of an international conflict in Korea, fought, among others, between two of the most powerful political entities of the contemporary world―the United States and the People’s Republic of China.1 In the growing confrontation between these two powers today, we are nervously reminded of the fact that the theater of the Korean War is the single space in modern history where young men from the United States and those not-so-young men from China took each other’s lives.A major crisis of the early Cold War and a pivotal episode of modern Korean history, therefore, the Korean War had several interrelated yet analytically separable dimensions. In my earlier work, I explored the question of how to remember creatively the destruction that Korea’s civil war wrought, especially in the realm of kinship and neighborhood (Kwon 2020). In this essay, I will raise the same question in relation to the war’s historical reality as an international conflict. I will focus on sites of the Hill Fight (1951-1953) in Korea’s central highlands, between Chinese and North Korean forces, on the one hand, and the United Nations forces on the other. Describing South Korea’s ongoing activities to account for killed in action/missing in action (KIA/MIA) on these old battlegrounds, I will explore how public actions concerning the remains of war closely intertwine with changing regional and global geopolitical conditions. I will then offer some thoughts on preserving these places as a meaningful heritage site for Asia’s peaceable future and as critical commentary on the geopolitics of war.