Korean War Vet­er­ans Memo­r­ial — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

Korean War Vet­er­ans Memorial

I was told one of the best times to pho­to­graph the Korean War Vet­er­ans Memo­r­ial was dur­ing snow­fall. Some­thing about the frost and snow con­di­tions makes this memo­r­ial quite eerie. Although I was there in win­ter, the weather didn’t oblige me with any snow for my own Korean War Vet­er­ans Memo­r­ial photo. As with most of my travel pho­tos, I like to look at the images other peo­ple shoot to get some ideas before I visit a place.

To be hon­est, I didn’t find many that impressed me. They also didn’t cap­ture the spirit evoked by the Korean War Vet­er­ans Memo­r­ial. Even though I wasn’t alive dur­ing the Korean War, I grew up with sto­ries about it. Almost every adult leader in my Boy Scout troop was a war vet­eran. They served in WWII, Korea and Viet­nam. Some of them over­lapped and served in two wars. Since M*A*S*H was a pop­u­lar show at the time, a lot of con­ver­sa­tions and war sto­ries came up from curi­ous Boy Scouts and the men who were try­ing to politely set the record straight.

They never told us any gory war sto­ries, but you could occa­sion­ally see a gri­mace if we got too close to a sen­si­tive sub­ject. Instead, these vet­er­ans brought the lessons they learned from their mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence and con­veyed them to the Scouts so we could ben­e­fit from their expe­ri­ence — with­out the need to go to war. They told us about the emo­tions of being on a patrol in the dark of night, won­der­ing if the next dan­ger would come from a hid­den attack or a land mine.

I admired those men. Still do. Some were com­bat engi­neers. Some were infantry. They all did their tours of ser­vice, but then they came home to live a fam­ily life and do their job as a plumber, mechanic or ship­ping clerk.

When I see the Korean War Vet­er­ans Memo­r­ial at night, the expres­sions on those stat­ues remind me of the sto­ries I heard as a teenager from the men who lived that expe­ri­ence. Those mem­o­ries guided the way I decided to process this image. I didn’t have a “look” in mind as much as I had a “feel­ing” that I wanted to con­vey. Maybe next Win­ter I’ll go back to see how it looks in the frost & snow.