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The Cold War Turns Hot
Vince walks off the north end of the map, into where China would be, and points to the list of names etched into the slightly-elevated stone arch that wraps around the memorial. "I think the K's start in the next tablet over," he says. He finds what he's looking for. "He's the third marker, the third name down that's etched in marble here. 'Krepps, Richard W.'" Losing a brother is devastating for anybody. But when Vince Krepps came into the world in the little coal and steel town of Linwood, Pennsylvania, in 1931, his twin brother Richard came right behind him. "We were never parted," he recalls. "Oh, we got measles together, we got everything together, you know. And as we got older we went on dates together with the girls that we met. We joined the Army together - was in the same platoon, just different squads." The 19-year-old twins landed in Korea with the 2nd Infantry Division in the summer of 1950. They'd come for what President Truman called a 'police action.' That's a phrase that infuriates Korea veterans to this day. "I heard it started from a reporter and he [Truman] just picked up on it," says Vince. "Somebody says, 'You mean this is a police action?' He says, 'Yes, that's what it is, it's a police action.' We was only over there for a short period of time to chase the North Koreans out of South Korea and the war would be over in a few months and we'd all be home. "But it didn't turn out that way." In the late 1940's, with World War II freshly behind them, Americans hoped peace and prosperity had finally come to stay. Millions bought new homes in the suburbs and had babies; there was talk of a new gadget called a television; Perry Como sang about doing as you please "in a land where dollar bills are falling off the trees," in his hit, "Dreamer's Holiday." But as the 40s closed, an emerging global enemy looked ready to cut the holiday short. The Red Scare was on, in Senator Joseph McCarthy's speeches and in radio debates about whether to officially ban the U.S. Communist Party. American leaders said they'd learned from their experience with the Nazis that the U.S. needed to confront the world's bullies sooner rather than later. At the same time, though, the United States had dramatically downsized its military. Especially in Asia. Almost nobody guessed that the first big test of the Cold War would come in Korea, the Utah-sized peninsula that juts out from Asia's east end. It had been sliced in half at the end of World War II, when the Soviet Union occupied the North and the Americans the South. The two occupation zones had hardened into separate countries, one a communist dictatorship tied to the Soviet Union, the other a corrupt, authoritarian society linked to the United States. In 1948 and '49, the Soviets and the Americans had pulled most of their troops off the peninsula. Neither South Korea nor its American protector were ready for what happened on June 25th, 1950. Next: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered…
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