Veteran Testimonies: Confronting Intergenerational Indifference to the War Memory

Abstract

The Korean War (6.25), which began on June 25th, 1950, was a devastating conflict that resulted in countless deaths. It caused widespread destruction across the Korean Peninsula and the permanent division of Korea, and the division still exists today. At the same time, the Korean War was an important historical turning point that set the stage for South Korea to pursue a democratic freedom and economic development. Later, Korea sent combat troops to Vietnam from 1964 to 1975, which was the biggest overseas deployment in Korean military history (1). Although the survivors of the war are still present in our society, both their numbers and their memories of war are gradually fading. To analyse and explore the characters of war memory, in-depth interviews were carried out with four veterans who served in either the Korean or Vietnam War. This research examines how war memories have been transformed into a form of collective memory, reflecting on the theory of Maurice Halbwachs. It also examines the emotional tensions of veterans when their war memories are forgotten or distorted within social and political narratives, through the theory of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ressentiment. After all, their testimonies were not only acts of resistance against forgetting or indifference. They were narratives of community—an effort to preserve the values they had risked their lives to uphold and to carry them forward into our society.