The Opium Ball & The 23,579-Soldier Delay

 
Most people who read me know I have a profound respect for the warrior, and by this I mean the warriors of all countries and all times in history.
 
As we enter into the Memorial Day Weekend, I thought I might say a few words about the Korean War, particularly since America's stupid and fascist president, George W. Bush, plans to atom bomb "North" Korea.
 
I doubt Mr. Bush knows much about Korea; he is an under-educated man with an advance college degree, a degree bought and paid for with daddy's money and power; and although he has chosen to call "North" Korea evil, that stupid, blundering man has no idea how great and strong the Korean people are.
 
Here is a primer for that fool who wants to make himself dictator of America.
 
There is an ancient nation in Asia called Korea, and after World War Two Korea was divided in half in a deal brokered between the United States of America and the Soviet Union.
 
This was a great crime committed against Korea, coming on the heals of the great crime of Japan's annexation and occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945.
 
During World War Two Korean men were drafted into the Japanese army and used primarily as enslaved laborers, and Korean women were made sex slaves for the Japanese military.
 
We forget such things because Japan is so cute and cuddly these days.
 
In June of 1950, when I was ten years old, "North" Korea invaded "South" Korea and the Korean War ensued.  I wanted so much to be a soldier in that war, but the war ended in July of 1953, and I was still about four years too young.
 
It was always my plan to be a military man, except for a period of a few years when I seriously considered entering the Roman Catholic priesthood.
 
However, God had God's plan for me, as you can hear in the telepathic broadcasts of my mind, and the tendency for the Roman Catholic Church to represent laws of man as laws of God dissuaded me from that vocation; and the fact that my ticker, my heart, went tick...tickticktick...tick...tickticktick made me physically unqualified to be a soldier.
 
I look at it this way, had God not given me a troubled heart I would have been a young US Marine infantry officer during the Vietnam War, and like my very good college chum, Jerry Woodall, I very likely would have died there--either that or I would have become a general because I am so good at war.
 
So you see, Dear Reader, Memorial Day is very important to me.  Next to Christmas, it is the most important day of the year.
 
When I briefly covered combat in Vietnam (and I did it only briefly because my employer, UPI, gave me absolutely no freedom of press, but that's another story) it seemed to be a common theme among American infantry officers to say the Korean War was a harder war than the Vietnam War.
 
One of the reasons frequently given was the Korean winter, because a wounded man could easily freeze to death before help arrived, and in general the wounded in Korea had far less chance to survive than the wounded in Vietnam and now, of course, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
I was in Korea one Christmas, covering the release of the crew of the Navy spy ship Pueblo, which had been captured by "North" Korea.  The point of my story today is not the capture of that ship, but how cold December is in Korea.
 
I am a North Dakota boy, Dear Reader, and Korea relative to North Dakota seemed very, very, very cold, and I wondered as that cold bit into me, how did those warriors survive in those foxholes?
 
Be patient, I am sashaying to my point, my point being a most interesting story told me by a Korean War vet, a man who had served in the Marines as a rifleman in the Korean War.
 
This former Marine and I met in a hospital where I was recovering from near-death brought on by blood clots which were brought on my America's torture-enslavement of me, and we had many interesting conversations, mostly about the Korean War but also about the concept of criminal insanity, which he understood quite well because he had worked at the Atascadero, California, State Hospital for the criminally insane.
 
(He told me the story of a "man" who tortured and murdered infants, and after some years in the mental hospital the government shrinks released him as "cured", and soon after he was released he tortured and murdered another infant.  Here is the thing, all the hospital staff had known he would torture-murder an infant again, all the staff except for the shrinks.  Psychiatry is a dangerous fraud.)
 
The criminality of psychiatry is one of the reoccurring themes of this work, but today we are talking about warriors.
 
This Marine told me two stories about the Koran War which you might find interesting.
 
This combat vet told me how the Marines would urinate on the mechanisms of their rifles to thaw them out, because otherwise they would not fire.  I don't know about you, but I found this very interesting; although I suppose all soldiers who have fought in sub-zero temperatures know this trick.
 
Here we come to something he told me which I had never heard of before, and I am a war buff and I have a lot of peculiar information about war; I study war like Hugh Hefner studies pictures of tits.
 
The American warriors in Korea soon discovered that the Chinese warriors went into battle with a ball of opium about the size of a ping pong ball in their medical kit.  These opium balls were meant to be used for pain when wounded, but they became highly sought-after prizes of war.  These opium balls was taken from dead Chinese and from Chinese prisoners of war, because they gave those suffering American warriors a drug-high, Dear Reader, a moment of pleasure in a world of frozen pain.
 
This, I suggest to you, may be the first time this opium ball information has been published in the United States of America, an I.C. News scoop over fifty years after the fact.