By Scott Graber
It is early, still dark, and cold — way beyond your Emporia, Kan., cold. A Kansas teenager sits in the crystalline darkness listening to the muttering, cursing and complaining of the Chinese soldiers as they put away their mess kits and get themselves ready for another assault.
A year earlier this Kansas teenager had been a high school senior focused on the junior-senior prom, a rented tuxedo and whether he would kiss another teenager named Claire.
The former farm boy had also been interested in seed quality; and if he and his father could repair their old, Massey-Harris combine.
But none of those skills mattered this morning. The only things that mattered were whether the 105mm artillery rounds would thin-out the ranks of the advancing Chinese infantry. Whether or not the Marine Corps F4U Corsairs would take off and lay down enough napalm. Whether or not his Browning Automatic Rifle would reliably fire when the young men from Chengdu got within “effective range.”
That scene — played out 73 years ago in Korea — is now being replayed in Kherson, Robotyne and Kupyansk in Eastern Ukraine. In many respects it is the same scenario played out at Somme in 1916; and at Leningrad in 1943. But, of course, the weapons are different — this current class of displaced teenagers constantly tinkering with battery-powered drones hoping one can be crashed into an advancing, reconditioned T-72 tank forcing its crew to erupt out of the turret and flee.
These particular teenagers know that if the Russian (or North Korean) infantry get past Pokrovst, it is mostly downhill to the Dnipro River and after that the land is mostly flat all the way to Kremenchuk. So, all along the 700-mile Eastern front, grim-faced, sleep-deprived Ukrainians are now launching thousands of drones making any and every (Russian) advance costly, blood-soaked, often suicidal.
Notwithstanding 200,000 to 250,000 Russians killed in action, they still line up when told to advance — some now riding motorcycles across the battlefield in a desperate attempt to evade the drones. Like the Chinese in 1951 the Russian conscripts still obey their cold-eyed, detached, indifferent officers.
While these Ukrainians do the killing; their young wives and children the dying; the older generation does the pleading for more weapons — mostly thermal cameras and spare parts for the drones. While Ukrainian youth reconfigure speed boats to attack and sink Russian cruisers, their fathers plead their case with Western politicians hoping for something more than sympathy.
It is probably useful to look back at the Korean War for clues as to when and why the shooting ended in 1953.
Everyone who has studied Korea knows that the North Korean Army quickly evaporated and the Chinese did the fighting and most of the dying. As long as the Chinese assembled their massive armies; as long as they rationalized their massive casualties; the war continued. But they, in turn, relied on the Soviet Union for their supplies, their ammunition and the Russian pilots who were flying brand new Mig-15s along the Manchurian border successfully, dramatically thinning out the waves of American B-29s flying over from Okinawa.
In March of 1953, Joseph Stalin died and his surviving, be-medalled colleagues decided they would no longer support Mao Z’dong and his ill-equipped conscripts.
Some also remember that Harry Truman had moved nine atomic bombs — without their plutonium cores — to Okinawa. A designated squadron of B-29s began practice runs on prospective Chinese targets but discovered there were few tactical targets worthy of a nuclear bomb.
General Mark Clark (who would later move to Charleston and The Citadel) met his Chinese counterparts in Panmunjom and they agreed to cut Korea in half along the 38th parallel. Apparently Zhou Enlai decided that getting half a loaf was a better deal than risking a nuclear war with another Kansas-bred farm boy, Dwight Eisenhower.
It is clear that Vladimir Putin has gotten most of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk (the so-called “Crimean land bridge”) back into Mother Russia. But Vladimir doesn’t want the 28,500 U.S. troops permanently deployed in South Korea to be re-deployed into Ukraine. Nor does he want 30,000 French, UK and German troops deployed along that border.
Ukraine will surely get a redrawn border; but in the end it will be the size, location and composition of European, boots-on-the-ground “guarantee” that will be the issue.
Apparently the Trump Administration wants no real role in these matters.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
