Days of Drums and Bugles : His body continues to fall through my dreams in a long, slow spiral.

I dug into a cardboard box in a dark corner of my closet the other afternoon to find the only souvenir I had kept from the Korean War. It is a photograph of me and my best friend at the time, a kid from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, named Joe Citera. We were two 20-year-olds decked out in combat gear, trying our damndest to look the part of mean Marines. I had an M-1 rifle and Joe held a .45 he had borrowed for the picture.

Despite our efforts to appear the very epitome of what the Corps used to call “perfect killing machines,” the fear and uncertainty of what lay ahead was written in our eyes. As well it should have been. In less than a week, Joe Citera would be dead.

I sat looking at the photograph for a long time, until the light had drained from the sky and the room was in almost total darkness. I was trying to recall the names of others I had known who died in what Winston Churchill once referred to as “the war that can’t be won, can’t be lost and can’t be ended.”

But we are three decades removed from those days of drums and bugles, and the names have vanished from my memory as quickly as Joe Citera vanished from my life on a bloody piece of land known only by its numerical designation, Hill 749.

I put the photograph away and said nothing for a long time. I couldn’t have talked if I wanted to. There are some griefs that time will never lessen.

I had not consciously thought about the Korean War for years. I say consciously because there are still nightmares occasionally, and I know that every terrifying moment of the 15 months spent in combat will be replayed for the rest of my life in a shadowy corner of my mind. I began to see some of them last week after receiving a call from a man named Larry.

He had guessed from earlier references in my column that I might have been in Korea during what everyone in the 1950s was calling the “conflict” or the “police action.” He was trying to form a Valley group to lobby for a Washington memorial honoring the 54,000 Americans who had died back then for a cause none of us fully understood. Larry wanted my help.

I left him dangling because the thought of a memorial had not occurred to me before. That afternoon, I dug out the picture of Joe, and in subsequent days tried to piece together the images of what had transpired in Korea and how I had felt about it, like a child trying to recall the terror of a distant thunder. To prod my memory, I stopped off at a small building in Northridge that houses a counseling center for veterans of the Vietnam War. I wanted to see some artifacts of combat.

The mementos filled one wall of the center: faded black and white photographs, a flak jacket, a helmet, some green berets, a citation for a Purple Heart and another for a Bronze Star, a camouflaged uniform, a dungaree hat, boots.

I studied them for 35 minutes and took notes, but it was only when I touched the helmet that images of a war long ago flashed back. There was the sound of Joe’s anguished voice on his dying night, the napalm-charred bodies of enemy soldiers frozen by sudden death in the posture of flight, the explosive disappearance of a Marine not 20 feet away who had stepped on a mine, the brittle winter roar of a thousand mortar shells as they struck like bolts of lightning from an iron gray sky.

I saw a young corporal (was that me?) , M-1 ready, at the point of his squad, rounding the bluff of a cliff on a narrow pathway high above an unnamed valley, coming face to face with a North Korean soldier, his automatic weapon at the ready.

There was a split second of stunned immobility, a heartbeat of indecision, and as I studied his face in the still-life of that isolated encounter--a smooth, round face with eyes that shone like polished coal--I remember thinking, my God, he’s only a kid!

We were trained well, the two of us, and our instincts were honed to survival. We reacted almost simultaneously in a conditioned reflex of two weapons pointed, but only one trigger pulled. I fired first. The enemy soldier (a boy!) disappeared from the cliffside as though he had been jerked from the ledge by a cable. His body continues to fall through my dreams in a long, slow spiral that will never end.

Joe Citera and an unknown North Korean, oddly companionable in the mutual context of their terrible destinies.

It was not my intention to burden anyone with my memories of a war best forgotten, but I did want to explain to a man named Larry, whose last name I didn’t even write down, why I will not participate in a campaign that would honor only the Americans who died in Korea.

Tribute, if required at all, is due those on both sides for having died so young and so bravely in such a brutal exercise of governmental power over our lives. But, by honoring the dead, we would be honoring their killers, and I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive myself (much less honor my deed) for blasting another human being into the long, slow turns of humanity’s sad history.