My father, Walter Pruett, was a rifleman in Korea in 1952. He was twenty years old. He came home in the spring of 1953, married my mother in 1955, worked thirty-four years for the county highway department, raised three of us, and died in October of 1994 at the age of sixty-three. He almost never talked about Korea. When we asked, as kids do, he would say "It was cold," and change the subject.

After he died my mother found a small notebook in the top drawer of his dresser, under the handkerchiefs, where I guess it had been for forty years. It's a pocket-sized memo book with a brown cardboard cover, about eighty pages, written in pencil, some pages so faint you have to tilt them to the window. It's not a diary exactly. Some weeks have an entry every day and some months have nothing. Most entries are a few lines. He was not a writer. He was a kid from a farm who was cold and far from home and wrote things down, I think, so that somebody would know.

I've typed it out here exactly as he wrote it, spelling and all, leaving out only a few lines that are private to our family and a few names of men he served with, since I have no way to ask their families. My mother and my brother and sister have read this page and agreed it should be here. If you served with a Walt Pruett in Korea, or your father did, I would be honored to hear from you.

I have not made it more than it is. He wouldn't have wanted that.

— Gary Pruett, September 1999

The inside cover says, in ink, Walter J. Pruett — if found please return and our home address at the time. Below that, in pencil and in a different hand, someone has written "Eddie owes me 2 packs." Eddie turns up all through the notebook. I never met him. The entries begin in January.

That is the last dated entry. The last two pages have a list of names and hometowns, which I've left out, and a column of figures that I think is his pay, and on the very last page, in ink and clearly written years later, the words "Eddie — 1971" and nothing else. I don't know what it means and I've decided not to guess.

Dad came home in March of 1953. He did fix the pump; my grandmother used to tell that story. He married Ruth Ann Kessler, who had sent him the paper pumpkin, in June of 1955, and she is my mother. He never went to a reunion, never joined a veterans' organization until my brother talked him into the American Legion in the 1980s, and never, that I know of, spoke Eddie's name to any of us. He kept his feet warm his whole life. He wore two pairs of socks to mow the lawn in July, and now I know why.

The one time I saw him cry was in 1988, when he read in the paper that the Korean War veterans were finally going to get a memorial in Washington. It was dedicated in July of 1995, nine months after he died. My mother and I went the following spring. It is a beautiful thing: nineteen steel soldiers in ponchos, walking up a slope through juniper bushes toward a flag, and a black granite wall with faces etched in it. The inscription at the pool says Freedom Is Not Free. I stood there a long time and thought about a can of peaches.

I put this page up because the Korean War is called the Forgotten War, and because my father's notebook is the least forgettable thing I own. I don't think he'd mind. I think he'd say "It was cold," and go check the pump.

For younger visitors, and for anyone who, like me, got about one paragraph on it in school. This is the short version, from library books; I'm a highway engineer, not a historian, and if I've got something wrong I would like to know.

• After the Second World War, Korea, which Japan had ruled since 1910, was divided at the 38th parallel into a Soviet-occupied North and an American-occupied South. By 1948 there were two separate governments, each claiming the whole country.
• On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces invaded the South. The United Nations Security Council called on member nations to help repel the attack, and the United States, under President Truman, committed troops within days. Some twenty other nations sent forces under the UN flag, but the great majority of the foreign troops were American.
• In the summer of 1950 the North Koreans drove the defenders down into a small corner of the southeast around Pusan. In September, General MacArthur's landing at Inchon, behind the North Korean lines, turned the war around, and UN forces pushed north nearly to the Chinese border by November.
• Then China entered the war in late 1950 with hundreds of thousands of troops, and the UN forces were driven back south in the bitter winter of 1950-51. Seoul changed hands four times. By the middle of 1951 the front had settled roughly where it had begun, near the 38th parallel.
• Truce talks began in July 1951 and dragged on for two years, at Kaesong and then at Panmunjom, while the fighting went on. This is the part of the war my father was in: two years of trench lines, outposts and patrols, and fighting for one hill after another with names like Old Baldy and Pork Chop Hill, in some of the worst weather American soldiers have ever fought in.
• The armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. It was a cease-fire, not a peace treaty; the two Koreas are still technically at war, and the Demilitarized Zone along the cease-fire line is still guarded by American and South Korean soldiers today, in 1999.
• More than 33,000 Americans were killed in action in Korea, and thousands more died of other causes in the theater; more than 100,000 were wounded, and about 8,000 are still listed as missing. Korean military and civilian deaths, north and south, were in the millions.
• The Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., near the Lincoln Memorial, was dedicated on July 27, 1995, the 42nd anniversary of the armistice.

If you'd like to read more, your public library will have shelves on the Second World War and Vietnam and about a foot on Korea. Start there anyway. Ask the librarian. And if you know someone who was there, ask them. Gently, and not all at once. My father would have talked, I think, if I'd known how to ask.