ROK Major General Nam Pyo Park, now living
in retirement near Fort Lewis, was a South
Korean Army colonel on the front lines during
the war. He was born in Vladivostok, Russia,
in 1923 when his parents were evading the
Japanese ruling their country. Park’s childhood
was a series of close calls. At 7, he watched the
Japanese kill his grandmother for aiding the
guerrillas.
A bright, athletic youth, Park graduated from
the Korea Military Academy and the U.S. Army’s
Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. In the
brutal back-and-forth battles that punctuated
the war, Park’s unit was pushing north when it
was ordered to fall back. “Everybody cried!” he
remembers. They felt victory was within reach.
In the postwar era, Park rose steadily to twostar
general. Retiring to Tacoma in the 1970s,
he soon became active in Korean-American
programs. “I have lived in six countries,” Park
says. “America is freedom country!” One of his
sons studied engineering at WSU, he notes
proudly. The general raised $58,000 for the
Korean War Memorial dedicated in 1993 on the
Capitol Campus in Olympia.