The greatest hero of WWII war movies was John Wayne. He made many great war movies. One was The Fighting Seabees. In this tale of final sacrifice, the great Wayne drove a bulldozer into a huge tank of flammable liquid, which exploded on impact and showered burning fluid onto the Japanese troops. Of course, John, himself was incinerated too.

It was largely war movies and the effect they had on me that inspired me to get into the Korean War. John Wayne was not only killed in Fighting Seabees, he was killed in other movies as well. He was killed in Sands of Iwo Jima when he played a great Marine hero. Brian Donlevy and William Bendix were killed in other movies too. There were many actors who played dying heroes during the war yet were seen again and again in other movies.

The point, then, is war movies do not give a child a very realistic picture of war or death. Because you see the great actor heroes rising from death again and again in other movies death can be seen as something temporary and inconsequential. If you go to war and die a hero, well, great! You are walking in the giant footsteps of John Wayne. And how serious can death be if it didn’t stop John.

Of course, I learned in Korea how serious war and death can be. War is not just bloody; it can also be very wet and horribly cold. In the present war it can be suffocatingly dusty and hot. And war is so noisy that no words can describe it. I sometimes think that if movies could really duplicate the noise of war, you couldn’t get anybody to participate. Sit under a tank cannon as it is being fired or see one of your own outposts being shelled by massive screaming, roaring artillery and you will understand what I mean.

Death, I learned in Korea is very permanent. The outpost I saw being shelled was held, but out of the platoon that was there only six men survived. It had been my platoons turn to man the outpost, but Lieutenant George Yates volunteered for the duty with his platoon . He was not one of the six survivors. And I remember the nice young red-haired corporal in my squad. I talked a lot to him about his life before the service and his future plans for college. Then he made Sergeant and moved to his own squad, and when he led them out on patrol he stepped on a land mine. When the corpsman tried to help him, he said he wasn’t hurt bad, to help the others. By the time the others were helped, he had already bled to death.

Since it happened in the last hour of the war, I think I helped carry off the last American killed in the Korean War. Other men brought him to my position, then I and a few fresher men carried him behind the lines. When we stopped, a corpsman removed his helmet and we all saw that the dressing surrounding his head was soaked in blood. The medic removed the dressing to check the wound. There was a hole the size of a garden hose and blood spurted out forcefully in a red stream. I don’t know how long he lived after an evac team moved him on quickly. It could not have been very long.

Now, once again after 9/11it is was absolutely necessary for Americans to go to war in Afganistan. If I was a young man again, I wonder if I would be willing to go too. Or would I dwell to long on the wet and the cold and the terrible, terrible noise of the artillery. Would I think too long on the permanence of death and the color of the bright red blood? Or would I, even though I know now what war is really like, become an American patriot once more. I hope that I would.