Most of our meager legacy of written history about the so-called “Forgotten War” in Korea would have current and future generations believe the Korean War began on June 1950 - when the North Koreans crossed the 38thParallel into Seoul - and ended one year later in July 1951 - when both sides sat down at negotiating tables in a village north of Seoul. 

Sadly, this is the farthest thing from the truth. 

The bitter and bloody fighting continued to rage during the ensuing two years of mindless - at times downright infantile - bickering between the negotiators before the truce was finally signed on July 27, 1953. Literally within a day’s march of the truce tents, battles on Pork Chop Hill, Old Baldy, Whitehorse Mountain, Bloody Ridge, the Iron Triangle, Heartbreak Ridge claimed a mind-boggling 400,000 American and UN soldiers and an estimated 1,200,000 of the North Korean and Chinese Communist enemies. 

Incredibly, over a half-century later, UN troops still anxiously patrol the Demilitarized Zone at the 38thParallel as current headlines portend the terrifying threat of North Korea’s nuclear ambition.

Just as James Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, From Here to Eternity, brought to life the workaday existence of a cadre of peacetime soldiers at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii during the months leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke described the surreal quality of existence in the nebulous ever-changing Vietnam combat zone became definitive novels of WWII and Vietnam, Brewster Milton Robertson’s sweeping new epic, Gone to Graveyards, places soldiers in seemingly mundane settings which eventually reverberate with the violence of war as North Korea invades Seoul.

Beginning with the invasion of Seoul - six weeks before the marriage of an ill-starred pair of young middle-class, southern American sweethearts: Collier Boyd Ramsay, an aspiring artist, and, Emma Lowell, a honors-graduate registered nurse—the narrative arc of Gone to Graveyards follows the effect this devastating conflict had on their lives, and continues a full five months beyond the Korean truce on July 27, 1953, into mid-December 1953.

Bittersweet young love, youthful dreams shattered by an unforeseen war, wartime promiscuity and betrayal, demoralizing failure of leadership, heart-clenching human suffering, inspiring heroism and long-kept-secret atrocities which eclipse the outrage of the Vietnam massacres at My Lai and My Khe, Gone to Graveyards offers up the foibles of this educated, but relatively unsophisticated, couple as an illuminating metaphor for a racially-segregated, workaday American society, examining under the burning glass, the soul-scarring physical and psychological toll the carnage this ignominious war exacted upon a world still quaking under the shadows of mushroom clouds—finally delivering after over a half-century clouded in obscurity, the all-encompassing history of the Korean War.