Operation Glory Chapter 2 Summary

Chapter 2: Operation Glory---Mission (Kind of) Accomplished: The chapter focuses on the reception of U.S. dead soldiers from North Korea (Operation Glory). It asserts that the failure of enforcing item 13(f) of the Korean War Armistice to recover remains in the hostile territory must be attributed to mutual distrust and tragic accidents, rather than merely North Koreans’ defiance of the agreement. Another preliminary finding is that the successful identification of many of the recovered remains should be credited to the military frequent outreach to soldiers’ families and clinics for their physical information, which probably changed contemporary people’s idea of identifying human remains. This chapter begins with the Korean War Armistice Agreement
During this time, the POW/MIA issue of the Vietnam War posed great challenges to contemporary forensic experts and was intensively politicized. The chapter will suggest that the Korean War and its POW/MIAs were almost forgotten in the U.S. policy-making and the American public. The Vietnam War revived the public attention to the Korean War POW/MIA myths and debates. The highly comingled, fragmented remains recovered from Indochina posed a serious challenge to the military, forcing it to revamp its forensic protocols. The chapter will firstly describe the absence of the POW/MIA issues in the diplomatic arena between the U.S. and North Korea. It will also show that U.S. even did not bother to locate remains in South Korea. Then, I will show the almost total absence of the trace of the Korean War POW/MIAs in the public attention (though some families still keep writing to the authorities). With secondary sources, I will present how the Vietnam War brought out the POW/MIA issues to an unprecedented degree. The climax of this chapter is a scandal in the CILHI in 1985, leading to an overhaul in its arsenal of