Brotherhood of War

In Kim's article, a generational gap is created between families, not just by time but by the act of having experienced, or not experienced the Korean War. There is a dilemma of memory established by the level of trauma personally experienced by Korean citizens during the war period, those who live through it clearly suffered loss and pain, but those who lived after are connected to the war as well, through the stories of their predecessors. Something that stood out to me in the film, and then struck me as applicable to Kim's argument, was Yong-shin's antagonism towards the war. In the film, Yong-shin accuses the South Korean government of not giving civilians anything, though she doesn't specify what needs to be given, her anger can be seen as caused by the lack of basic needs for a large part of the Korean population. I first thought of her comment against the government as representing the lower level consequences of war, the side effects on those not physically involved in the conflict, and as representing the pointlessness of war. Looking deeper into it though, and after reading Kim's article, I began thinking that even more than representing the above two thoughts, Yong-shin's attitude shows how many times the poor civilian populations of a war torn country do not care about the war nearly as much as the government and soldiers think they do. When you're struggling to get enough food to feed your family, fighting against another nation, choosing sides of the conflict, is not a priority. I think that this is something that could potentially be lost between the generational gap of those who lived through the war and those who live through its memories; for people who hear stories of the war, the suffering, the cruelty, it is hard to imagine that war wouldn't be the center of everyone's lives for the time it was occurring. For those who did live through it, but were more concerned with immediate survival because of the lack of state support, it must be hard to explain why war wasn't the most important thing.