The Chinese offensive pushed the American and South Korean forces into a long retreat down the Korean peninsula. They killed hundreds of thousands of South Koreans and only American naval superiority allowed the UN to evacuate two hundred thousand soldiers and civilians back to the south. The armies were far too depleted to keep the combined forces of North Korea and China from once again conquering Seoul, the once proud capital of Korea.
There aren’t a lot of bands with flutes and trumpets. Guitars though? Those are big in bands. So I taught Julie and Alex to play guitar. Don’t get me wrong. They knew how to strum a guitar before we got together, but there’s a difference between that and really jamming out a song on stage. And if I learned anything in marching band it was how to play to the crowd. That proved invaluable when it came time to start a band.
Fringe elements of society will always be with us. There are some people who will always see, act, and be different. Some will never be able to conform. Some of them will always be able to interact with society, deal with people even as they keep their distance. Others will not. Some never want to. The rise of interconnected technologies in the early twenty-first century gave these fringe elements greater access to society than ever before. That is one reason it all went so bad.
Mainland China had fallen to the socialists by the time of the Korean War and they had an impressive army. They had minimal training but decades of experience in the long Chinese Civil War. They’d taken hideous losses against the Japanese but the survivors knew how to fight. And those survivors formed the core of a million-man army ready to cross the border. They smashed the South Korean and American armies when they came.
Julie and Alex taught me to read music, to study in school, and so much more. And in return I taught them how to play by ear. I taught them to break the rules, in music and in the rest of life. Sometimes the best things in music come from playing outside the rules. Life too. I taught them to put the music down and play what they felt. That was when they decided they wanted to start a band. I was all over that like white on rice.
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