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to make an official declaration of war. General Douglas MacArthur and his U.S. and U.N. troops orchestrated an invasion of Inchon and then recaptured Seoul, passing the 38th parallel to the Northern side, which prompted China to send in troops to protect its interests in Manchuria. MacArthur continued to push northward until he was relieved of his duties by President Truman, a politically unpopular move since MacArthur was a WWII war hero. Both sides tried to negotiate a peace treaty but disagreed over many of the provisions, so fighting continued. In 1953 at Panmunjom, a treaty was signed that brought about a cease-fire and returned the divided line to its prewar coordinates. The war would later inspire the novel and subsequent film and television series M*A*S*H, about the doctors and support staff stationed at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, which was located near Ouijongbu during the war.

☞ THE COLD WAR

Difficult to date because it wasn’t really a war, but a period of intense mutual distrust between former World War II Allies—the United States, U.K., and France on the one hand and the USSR on the other—at its height during the 1950s. Winston Churchill coined the term “iron curtain” for the ideological and political barrier that separated east from west. Tensions began to diminish during the 1970s and 1980s, especially with the introduction by Mikhail Gorbachev of the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction—specifically of the economy), which led to the breakup of the USSR.

☞ 1959-75: THE VIETNAM WAR

Much of the fighting occurred between 1964 and 1975 in South Vietnam and bordering areas of Cambodia and Laos. Several bombing runs over North Vietnam also occurred.

The United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea all joined forces with the Republic of Vietnam to fight the North, with its communist-led South Vietnamese guerrilla movement and the National Liberation Front backed by USSR-supplied weaponry.

The seeds of the Vietnam War were planted during the First Indochinese War, when the communists, under Ho Chi Minh, fought the French for independence. After a socialist state was established in the North, mass killings of “class enemies” followed. Eventually, a U.S.-backed government in the South launched its own anticommunist campaign. However, the South’s autocratic and nepotistic president, Ngo Dinh Diem, had trouble with insurgencies. The CIA apparently alerted generals in the South that the United States would support a coup, and Diem was eventually assassinated. This caused chaos in the South, and the Viet Cong gained ground.

At this point U.S. president John F. Kennedy increased U.S. forces in the area to help train troops. Three weeks after Diem’s death, Kennedy was also assassinated. The Vietnamese War was fraught with controversy; some Americans strongly feared a communist scourge, whereas others did not feel that the United States should police the world, toppling regimes out of fear, causing even more unrest. President Nixon ordered a suspension of the action in 1973 and soon afterward signed the Paris Peace Accords, which ended U.S. involvement in the conflict. After that, the North ignored the cease-fire agreement, invaded the South, taking Saigon (being renamed Ho Chi Minh City), and forming the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Many supporters of the South were jailed or executed.

☞ 1991: THE GULF WAR

The Gulf War involved the high-tech conflict between Kuwait and U.N.-led forces against Iraq in order to remove Iraq forces that overran Kuwait in a surprise assault. The Iraqis had several claims for the attack, including that the Kuwaitis were stealing their oil through slant drilling on the border, and that Kuwait had been part of the Ottoman Empire’s province of Basra. This war was largely fought from the air and from tanks, with U.N. forces grossly outnumbering the Iraqi forces. U.N. forces liberated Kuwait and attacked southern Iraq. The troops pulled out after Iraq agreed to a U.N. resolution requiring the Middle Eastern country