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'Fear and gratitude': Iconic photo captures Canada's role in a forgotten war
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There is a valid argument to be made that Canada was fighting to protect South Korea, Sayle said, but the way the conflict played out 'robs the war of any satisfying heroic narrative, especially because it ends in armistice rather than true peace. There's no closure for the public. There's no celebration, no Victory in Korea day,' Sayle said.
Over the following years, as Korea slipped from immediate memory into modern history, there was another shooting war in Southeast Asia that coloured its remembrance. Korea was in that sense 'in the shadow of Vietnam,' Sayle said.
In the 1980s and 1990s, when there was an 'explosion of memory' of the Second World War, as Sayle puts it, this sharpened the contrast with Korea, leaving its veterans sometimes overlooked, out of the Remembrance Day spotlight.
'Just because of the historical nature and context I think we can understand why it was forgotten, but that doesn't excuse the forgetting of these veterans and their experiences,' Sayle said. As this photo illustrates and reminds, any individual soldier's experience of war is 'indivisible,' Sayle said.
Seventy-five years since the forgotten war began, this photo is still able to convey that experience, and to imprint it in the Canadian memory.
