Korea was my first experience of fighting a shooting war and a conference table war at the same time. But I had two years of head-knocking with the R… - Mark W. Clark

I remember an incident when, as Chief of Army Field Forces, I went to Fort Benning, Georgia, to watch the instruction of the first class of Korean officers sent to America. I have seen a lot of training in my years of experience in the Army, but never had I seen more attentive concentration on the instructor. Not a Korean shifted his eyes from the instructor once during the session. It appeared to me that each Korean officer felt that in some way the mere physical process of unbroken sight of the instructor would speed the process by which he learned from the American teacher.

The ROK Army military school system was patterned exactly after ours, as was their naval training system. The ROKs during the war developed a Korean West Point and a Korean Annapolis. They created their own war college to give their officers more education as they showed the capacity for higher command. All the senior instructors and most of the junior instructors have been through our schools as well as their own. They taught by our American methods, with our American weapons and from translated versions of our American military texts and manuals.

A soldier's life in combat is an endless series of decisions that mean success or failure, and perhaps life or death for himself or his comrades. The rifleman crawling through the rubble of a bombed-out street must decide on the best moment to escape enemy fire as he dodges from one doorway to the next. He must take a chance. The general seeking to break an enemy defense line and destroy his forces must decide just when and how to strike and precisely to what extent he dare weaken one sector of his front in order to mass overpowering strength at the main point of attack. He, too, must take a chance, although, in the stilted phraseology of military communiqués, he calls it a "calculated risk".