It is my true honor to be given this opportunity to address this great gathering. Epecially so since this town is where I spent all my early school years. I grew up next to Camp Walker, and the schools I attended were all a stone’s throw away from Camp Henry, another prominent US military base existing in Daegu. I mentioned this in a recent interview during which I was asked how I came to take interest in Cold War history in the first place, somewhat uniquely as an anthropologist. That is, many years before I crossed in 1990 the then-existing Iron Curtain to undertake my first fieldwork in a remote place of the former Soviet Union. So I thank the AAS and the host of this conference for inviting me back to this place where all seem to have started for me and my career.

Daegu takes up an important place in the history and heritage of the Korean War, the subject of my small contribution today. On the side of history, the river that surrounds the town along its northern reach, Nakdong River, is prominent. This is where in the early days of the 1950–1953 war the South Korean and the US forces confronted their stronger, then-triumphant antagonist, North Korea’s People’s Army. The gruesome reality on this battlefield in the summer of 1950 comes quite close to what we know of the Korean War as a civil war or a fraticidal war—with an added complication that a large number of the People’s Army forces were then South Korean youth and students conscipted from the territory of the Republic of Korea under their occupation. The condition of this reality, a stagnant frontline that claimed countless lives, was also akin to that of one of the best known episodes of modern warfare—the trench war of 1914–1918. Another major standoff developed during the later days of the war--this time, near the 38th Parallel and especially along the central highlands of the Korean peninsula where the United Nations forces confronted the Chinese and North Korean forces.

A major crisis of the early Cold War, the Korean War was therefore much more than a civil war. It was also an international conflict fought between, among others, two of the most powerful nations of the contemporary world, the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Remarkably, the legacies of this war continue to shape the geopolitical conditions in East Asia and beyond. In my earlier work, After the Korean War: An Intimate History (2020), I explored the question of how to creatively remember the destruction of Korea’s civil war. This question was also the subject of my earlier appearance to the AAS-in-Asia, the Kyoto meeting in 2014. On this occasion, allow me to raise the same question in relation to the war’s historical reality as an international and global conflict. The focus will be on sites of the Hill Fight (1951–1953) in the central highlands, between Chinese and North Korean forces, on the one hand, and on the other, the United Nations forces. Describing South Korea’s ongoing initiative of MIA (Missing In Action) accounting activities on these old battlegrounds, I will explore how public actions concerning the remains of war are closely intertwined with changing geopolitical conditons, regional and global. This will be followed by some thoughts on preserving these places as a meaningful heritage site for Asia’s peacible future and as critical commentary on the geopolitics of war—namely, in alignment with this conference’s overarching theme of “Asia in Motion: Memory, Preservation and Documentation.”

It is my true honor to be given this opportunity to address this great gathering. Epecially so since this town is where I spent all my early school years. I grew up next to Camp Walker, and the schools I attended were all a stone’s throw away from Camp Henry, another prominent US military base existing in Daegu. I mentioned this in a recent interview during which I was asked how I came to take interest in Cold War history in the first place, somewhat uniquely as an anthropologist. That is, many years before I crossed in 1990 the then-existing Iron Curtain to undertake my first fieldwork in a remote place of the former Soviet Union. So I thank the AAS and the host of this conference for inviting me back to this place where all seem to have started for me and my career.

I joined the mission’s forensic anthropological taskforce in 2007 as an external advisor. This was when the previously army-managed modest activity was upgraded in status and scale and subsequently transferred to the mandate of South Korea’s Ministry of National Defence. Since then, the mission’s official title has become the Ministry of National Defence Agency for KIA Recovery and Identification (henceforth, Korean KIA recovery mission). The Korean Killed In Action mission has since covered nearly all of the major battlegrounds of the Korean War (within the territory of South Korea), starting from the Nakdong parameter, where the South Korean and US forces confronted North Korea’s strong People’s Army (KPA) in the early days of the war, from July to September 1950. Later the mission concentrated on sites of vicious hill fights in the central region. This is where South Korean, US and other UN forces confronted the Chinese and North Korean forces, following China’s intervention in the Korean War in October 1950. It was a war of attrition whose condition was akin to the trench warfare of 1914–1918 in northern France. The hill fight lasted until the very last day of the Korean War on July 27, 1953. This is where the drama of The Brotherhood of War unfolds; it is also the background of South Korea’s another popular war film, Hill Fights (Gojijŏn, 2011), which features dreadful fights over the hills between the two Korean forces. In the cinematic history of the Korean War, the hill fights have long been a favorite subject. The important war film of the earlier era, titled The Marines Who Never Returned (Dolaoji atnŭn haebyŭng, 1963), for instance, takes these hill fights as its dramatic, concluding episode, although here the fight is between Chinese troops and their outnumbered South Korean antagonists.

Modelled on the American MIA/POW accounting agency, the Korean taskforce later collaborated with the US agencies and other former UN allies, such as Belgium. It briefly expanded its activity to Vietnam in 2015 (concerning Korean MIAs in the second Indochina war). There was even a discussion to collaborate with the North Korean counterpart on the surveying of the Demilitarized Zone, the heavily fortified borderland between the two Koreas. However, the most notable aspect of the external activity of Korean KIA and MIA accounting involved China. In 2014, the remains of the Chinese volunteer soldiers to the Korean War that had been discovered as part of South Korea’s search-and-find activities began to be repatriated to their homeland, mostly to a designated place in Shenyang.

The last initiative subsequently became a notable event in the history of war commemoration in the broad region. The idea of bringing home the human remains lost in foreign wars is a modern invention, closely tied to America’s public history since its Civil War times.2 South Korea’s excavation activity has contributed to expanding this originally American tradition to an international practice, eventually involving China. Therefore, perhaps it could be argued that the commemoration of war has increasingly become an American art (epitomized by the slogan “Untile the Last Man Comes Home”) in this part of the world, irrespective of the fact that different states and societies within the region may not understand what they do in this light. In 2014 2015, public enthusiasm in China concerning their homecoming heroes was nearly indistinguishable from what we had witnessed before in the US regarding its own heroes from Korea. The immensely popular “Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea” war campaign (i.e., Korean War) film in China, My War (2016), which features hill fights between the Chinese and US forces, testifies to this, and so does the following box-office hit, The Battle at Lake Changjin (2021). These films were released when tensions between the United States and the People’s Republic of China were escalating on economic and military fronts, and because of this, there was a renewed interest in the Korean War, this time, as an episode of Sino-American relations. In this sense, the Korean War’s Hill Fights is far from an old history only but increasingly a vital site of memory where the history and legacy of the Korean War as an international conflict are vigorously contested between two of the most powerful political entities of the contemporary world, China and the US

Since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, this Sino-American dimension of the Korean War has been the subject of prolific investigations. This is in part because of the growing availability of previously inaccessible archival sources held in the former Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere in former Eastern Bloc countries. The growing attention on the Korean War as a pivotal episode of US-Chinese relations is also because the implications of this particular dimension of the war reverberate strongly in the unfolding contemporary world politics. It is a broadly shared view among scholars of American history that the United States became a military superpower through the Korean War, and China’s pursuit of a great power status today, according to some historians of China, began with its active role in the Korean War (that is, in place of the USSR).3 Taking note of these facts, we may add that in the escalation of hostility between these two powers, the diffusion of the art and politics of MIA/KIA recovery from one to the other power played a rather significant part.

The unaccounted-for remains of the Korean War have other geopolitical properties, however. Earlier I mentioned the two distinct phases of the 1950–1953 war. One was the standoff between North Korea’s rapidly advancing People’s Army forces and the South Korean and US defences along the Nakdong river in the environs of Daegu. Excavations on this battleground have recovered primarily Korean bodies (many of the KPA recruits were, as mentioned, South Korean students and youth hastily mobilized within the KPA-occupied areas, and most of the fallen American bodies had been removed from the sites during the war and immediately afterwards). In contrast, the sites of chaotic hill fights, along the rugged mountain regions of central Korea, host a diverse group of fallen soldiers—American, British, Canadian, Ethiopian, French and other UN troops, as well as Chinese and Korean. What distinguishes these two phases was the northward advance of the US and South Korean troops following the ambitious manoeuvre in Incheon in September 1950 that broke the will and morale of the KPA forces. It also involves China’s all-out intervention in the theatre of the Korean War starting in late October 1950. Forced into a hasty and chaotic retreat, both the US and South Korean forces failed to recover numerous bodies of their fallen comrades during this time. The recovery of these long-lost bodies became a key issue in the negotiation between Washington and Pyongyang for possible rapprochement. This transpired primarily in the decade of the 1990s, during which Washington pursued a similar policy in relation to Vietnam. The MIA-focused diplomatic initiative was abruptly discontinued under the George W. Bush’s administration, shortly after Bush’s so-called Axis of Evil speech on January 29, 2002, in which he designated North Korea as part of three terrorism-breeding rogue states, together with Iraq and Iran.

Forensic work along the former Nakdong parameter in the environs of Dagu primarily concerned, as mentioned, the remains of the Korean fallen. The Korean KIA/MIA taskforce consisted of a search-and-find team and an identification team, with the latter responsible for the classification of the found remains by racial and national belongings, as well as for DNA specification and storage. Those identified as belonging to the northern army are brought to a burial place near the Demilitarized Zone. As their activity went on, this place changed its name from the previous Cemetery for Enemy Soldiers to the Cemetery of North Korean and Chinese Combatants, a notable amendment indeed.

One memorable episode was about a vivid dream that a member of the Korean KIA mission, an archaeology student, had one night. In her dream, a young woman wearing the uniform of a KPA officer was indignant at the archaeologist. The officer slapped her face, saying “How dare you treat my body that way!”. Hearing the story over the breakfast, members of the excavation team concluded that the incident related to one of the few sets of human remains the team was working on during the previous days. We knew that the archaeology student mishandled one thigh bone, breaking it into two pieces. Although the KPA officer was a southern Korean in origin (her remains were discovered together with two personal items, which indicated that before the war, the fallen soldier was a college student in Seoul), these “enemy remains” did not go through further identification procedure such as DNA extraction and recording. The last was reserved for the human remains that were identified, during the excavation team’s initial screening, as belonging to South Korea’s national army.

In contrast to these places, the work on old hill fight sites often yielded a more diverse collection of remains in terms of racial and national profiles, especially in places that had witnessed chaotic hand-to-hand fights. Many of these battlegrounds also changed hands several times. Having spent nearly two generations together, these remains parted company as they were being unearthed. They were moved to different resting places--laboratories and then South Korea’s national cemeteries, temporary shelters near the Demilitarized Zone, and the cemetery of war martyrs in China, which are all, despite directional differences, commonly organized in discreet national groupings. Once gone this way, the old resting places (that is, the excavation sites on the hills) revert to unremarkable bushes, leaving no trace of cohabitation among groups and individuals across the thresholds of racial, national and political differences.

The above phenomenon speaks of the established art of war commemoration in modern politics. Modern war cemeteries embody some core principles of modern political life. Equality and fraternity are among them, as observed in the many the World War I cemeteries dotting the former Western Front in northern France and western Flanders. In these places, the bodies of fallen soldiers are buried in simple, identical individual graves irrespective of their differences in class, rank and other social backgrounds—thus the principle of equality or “democracy of death” as Thomas Laqueur calls it.4 Collectively, the fallen soldiers are typically divided into discrete national groupings and put to rest in separate national cemeteries.

There are exceptions, however. Notable among them is the St-Symphorien military cemetery east of Mons in Belgium. Most soldiers buried in this place had fallen in the very early days of WWI, during the Battle of Mons, before the war evolved into the trench warfare further west.5 The brutality of the trench war is well known; so are its tragic consequences. The victims of the trench warfare were mostly retained by their respective national armies and buried accordingly within the generally stagnant parameters to which these armies were holding on, with tremendous sacrifice of human lives. In contrast, the earlier conflict represented by the battle of Mons was mobile and chaotic, with battlefronts changing rapidly in time, which resulted in the bodies of fallen soldiers being lost to the enemy group. Military burial customs were yet undetermined in those early days of the conflict; the dead bodies were often hastily buried in village woods or elsewhere readily available. The result was military graveyard, such as the St-Symphorien cemetery, where one group of fallen soldiers came to share their resting space with their enemies.

The St-Symphorien military cemetery keeps 284 German graves and 229 Commonwealth graves, including those of several Irish and Canadian servicemen. Although their graves are organized into discreet, separate national groupings within the immaculately landscaped cemetery, the place as a whole constitutes a unique site of memory whose structure departs considerably from that of other better-known Western Front cemeteries. The idea of equality applies to both structural forms; in St-Symphorien, as elsewhere, soldiers are buried in simple, nearly identical graves (although headstones slightly differ between British and German graves). However, the idea of fraternity, clearly and prominently manifested in others places, is far less certain in St Symphorien. In the latter, whereas British and German graves make up small circles of separate fraternal solidarity, the relationship between these collectives of graves cannot be identified in the same language of solidarity or according to the existing idea of fraternity and national unity that are familiar in the history of modern war.

Currently, the manifest symbolic property of the St-Symphorien cemetery is not national solidarity but an identity of solidarity that transcends national origins. In August 2014, in the run-up to the centenary of WWI in 2014–2018, the UK government decided to foreground the message of conciliation for its WWI Centenary, choosing to inaugurate the 4-year process at the British–German cemetery in St-Symphorien. This followed the German and the French initiative to hold joint commemorative ceremonies at several locations in northern France. The Centenary attracted a great deal of interests from the national and the local administrations of Europe, involving focused attention to the aesthetics of mixed graveyard and to the related conciliatory gestures of collaborative commemoration.

The question then is: Can we find a place like St-Symphorien in the old theatre of the Korean War—at a time when there is a need to do so? This time can be a time when a genuine peace is found in the region and when the sense of a community of nations has become a reality—a prospect still unforeseeable at the moment. Otherwise, it can be a time of crisis building up for a renewed conflict and in view of this crisis, when the conscientious public can reflect on the futility and brutality of war.

In fact, hundreds of St-Symphorien stand on the old grounds of the Korean War’s hill fights. As the public policy of “Until the Last Man Comes Home” advances, however, these sites disappear from view and their unique compositions are obliterated.6 The ethos of “Until the Last Man Comes Home” is vital to the moral integrity of the modern nation state, and it undoubtedly constitutes a far more superior form of dealing with modern warfare’s mass human sacrifice than, for instance, what we witness at the eastern end of Europe today, where bodies of fallen soldiers are reportedly being abandoned by their comrades-in-arms. However, this democracy of death may have its own limits and at times, may need to be counterbalanced by a different ethics and aesthetics of death commemoration that can go beyond the prevailing art of commemoration of the past century, singularly centred on the integrity of a national community.

I believe that modern forensic anthropology is strong in its discomfort with the friend/enemy contrast and in its vocational ethics that takes all remains of the dead, whether friends or enemies, equally meaningful and all telling unique stories. This was the case with my colleagues and the students of anthropology and archaeology with whom I was privileged to work together during my time with the Korean Army’s KIA taskforce. Their judicious and painstaking work, nevertheless, also breaks apart the community of co-dwelling fallen soldiers and contributes to encapsulating them in narrowly defined fraternities.

At the end of a laborious day under the scorching sun, the diggers, as we were called, although utterly exhausted, are happy to have achieved some meaningful recovery and to have helped some old soldiers to find a way back to their homes. Am I alone, however, in feeling uncertain, now and then, about whether what we achieved that day was truly the right thing to do? Is there a way to do justice to the long common, intimate, neighborly existence of these fallen soldiers—to preserve this material history that is no longer a material fact in the hills of the old Hill Fight? Am I wrong to imagine if some of the old soldiers of the Korean War Hill Fight, back in their homeland and resting in nice and beautifully landscaped national cemeteries, might wonder, now and then, “Where are my close old neighbors?

Thank you.