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The Korean War Educator
is a privately funded, non-profit history project documenting
the memoirs of Korean War Veterans, Gold Star family members,
DMZ vets and others involved in the "Forgotten War."
This includes combat veterans, as well as male and female
support personnel who served behind our lines and offshore.
It is not affiliated with any museum or veterans' organization,
and is solely the work of Lynnita Aldridge Sommer. She is
a museum administrator who travels throughout the country
as an independent researcher to document, via oral tapes,
interviews with the noted subjects. To make sure that Korean
War veterans across the nation have the opportunity to share
their memoirs, Lynnita also interviews veterans online.
Interviews with combat veterans may take as much as three
to nine hours with details sought out in three categories:
pre-military life, military life and post-military life. Other
interviews may take a minimum of two hours. When the interviews
are at length fully transcribed they will be combined into
a document featuring segments of the interviews supported
by photographs and educational material about the Korean War,
and will become available to the public.
It is fifty years since the start of the war that saw more
than 33,000 battle deaths and more than 103,000 service personnel
wounded. This historic project preserves the first-hand accounts
of veterans who moved from the States to Sasebo and Kobe in
Japan and on to the flaming valleys of North and South Korea.
It covers the Chinese entry into the war, the Frozen Chosin,
the Hamhung survival, the breakout from the Pusan Perimeter,
the highly surprising and successful Inchon Invasion, and
the knockdown, drag-out rituals of survival. If each veteran
interviewed blunts and treats lightly his own heroics, be
assured that the deeds of his comrades will not be taken the
same way. These are stories told from the inside out, first-hand,
on the spot. They are personal histories of the highest order
and belong to everybody who has a yearning for history, for
drama, for heroics from men in the toughest of predicaments
and those highly trained logistics personnel who served in
support roles. It is through the eyes of the men and women
who actually witnessed, fought and survived the Korean War
that the sacrifices made by those who suffered and died in
that war can be truly appreciated.
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