Next year, 2010, marks the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of what is aptly called “The Forgotten War.” While Kim Il-sung's invasion of the Republic of Korea in the early hours of June 25th, 1950, ignited the first hot war of the cold war – and the first and only war in which the two superpowers would clash on the battlefield – it is a war that is almost dead to the public mind and popular culture of the western world.

It was a savage war in a devastated land; a war that was civil, ideological and even racial in nature, a war that sucked in fighting men from as far afield as Columbia and China, Ethiopia and Russia. It was a war in which entire US units were annihilated, an intense war which generated casualties far in excess of those incurred in today's conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet despite its many dramatic elements – and despite the fact that it has never really ended - Korea never achieved the same status in the western mind as did the wars that bookmarked it: World War II and Vietnam.