History

This began the deployment of Task Force Smith, the first American combat troops to arrive and fight in the Korean War.

Following years of border skirmishes that left thousands dead on both sides, the North Koreans launched a full-scale invasion against the south on June 25, 1950. The North Korean army was well-trained and well-equipped with the latest Soviet tanks and artillery. It was Soviet leader Josef Stalin himself who reluctantly gave the go ahead to North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung to invade.

The South Koreans were in no position to effectively resist. They had no tanks, little artillery, a minuscule air force and were demoralized after bloodily crushing a series of domestic uprisings. Though the U.S. had largely exited the south by the outbreak of the war, the Soviet Union had built North Korea’s army into a fearsome instrument.

With just six C-54 transport planes available for airlift, Smith was only able to take two understrength infantry companies with a skeleton headquarters and a weapons platoon with a few mortars, obsolete bazookas and 75mm recoilless rifles. In all, they comprised little more than 400 men. They landed in Pusan, South Korea, on the morning of July 1 and took a scratch collection of Korean trucks and civilian automobiles to the train station. Once there, Smith was told by a general: “All we need is some men out there who won’t run when they see tanks.”

1182px 폭격기_(7445973890) On the train ride heading north, they had a front row seat to the chaos and confusion in the face of the invasion. Four Royal Australian Air Force fighters strafed an ammunition train heading north to resupply South Korean soldiers, blowing it sky high and killing many local civilians. In another incident, friendly planes destroyed a column of 30 South Korean trucks, killing over 200 soldiers. One officer present observed: “The fly boys really had a field day! They hit friendly ammo dumps, gas dumps, the Suwon air strip, trains, motor columns, and KA [Korean Army] Hq.”

After linking up with a battery of 105mm artillery that had just arrived by sea, Task Force Smith headed north of Osan on July 4 to scout out positions for the coming battle. Their mission was simple: Delay the North Korean advance as long as they could. They could see South Korean engineers wiring bridges for demolition along the way.

1099px thumbnail On July 5 at 7 AM, with the soldiers dug and the artillery positioned, they spotted a column of North Korean tanks. Artillery called in against them proved ineffective, and despite waiting until the T-34 tanks were at close range, the 75mm recoilless rifles couldn’t penetrate their armor. A flurry of bazooka shots failed to penetrate as well. Anti-tank mines tailored for the situation were not available in Korea.

The artillery only had six anti-tank rounds, and it was these that disabled two enemy tanks. The armor came in waves, barely stopping to engage the U.S. infantry as they drove south. After they passed, Task Force Smith knew that enemy infantry was on the way.

M20_75_mm_recoilless_rifle_korean_war The approaching column of trucks was estimated by Smith to be six miles long, with three tanks taking the lead. When they were within a thousand yards the Americans raked the column with .50 caliber machine guns, mortars, and artillery. Many trucks were destroyed, and enemy infantry dismounted and proceeded to engage in a double envelopment maneuver. Like the tank columns before them, they seemed more concerned with going around the task force than engaging it.

By 2:30 p.m., with large numbers of the enemy on his flanks and in his rear, Smith decided if any of his men were going to get out, it would have to be then. Elements leapfrogged back, abandoning their heavy weapons, their dead, and some of the more seriously wounded. A medical sergeant volunteered to stay behind with them. The artillery spiked their guns upon receiving the word to withdraw.

Task Force Smith suffered its heaviest casualties during the retreat, with enemy machine gun positions hitting them from close range. Elements straggled back into Osan piecemeal, with some scattered men walking all the way to the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. One man arrived at the Pusan perimeter by Saipan from the west coast. In all, Task Force Smith suffered 42 killed and 85 wounded.

lossy page1 1109px Crew_members_of_Company_D,_89th_Tank_Battalion,_give_first_aid_to_wounded_soldier,_during_action_against_the_Chinese..._ _NARA_ _531407.tif Over time, Task Force Smith became a cautionary tale, to the point that upon becoming Army chief of staff in 1991, Gen. Gordon Sullivan said, “My theme as Chief of Staff is ‘No more Task Force Smiths.’” After World War II, cutbacks left American troops poorly trained, under equipped, and often badly understrength. The Army was unprepared for Korea, and the soldiers paid the price.

Stalin had resisted the idea of the North invading the South for years out of fear of American intervention, but with the U.S. withdrawal starting in 1948, the situation seemed changed. Stalin, Communist Chinese Premier Mao Zedong, and Kim Il-Sung assumed that the United States would not get directly involved. Stalin was no stranger to this kind of miscalculation. His misreading of his erstwhile ally Adolf Hitler led to one of the greatest geopolitical disasters of the 20th century.

There was little to disabuse the troika of this notion. In January 1950, a mere six months before the war, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had left South Korea out of the U.S.’s Pacific defense strategy in a speech to the National Press Club. The communists interpreted this doctrine as a “green light” for invasion, and anticipated a quick victory. They were badly mistaken.

The overwhelming strategic concern — far exceeding the fate of a relative backwater like Korea — lay less than six hundred miles off the Korean coast: Japan. Under U.S. occupation and still rebuilding from the terrible destruction of World War II, Japan was vital to U.S. military power in the Pacific. If South Korea fell, Japan would face a grave threat leaving U.S.’s Pacific defense strategy in ruins.

1200px Armored_Forces_Memorial_ _Korea_left_ _Arlington_National_Cemetery_ _2011 After American and UN reinforcements arrived, a counteroffensive drove the North Korean military to the brink of collapse. When UN forces approached the Yalu River, China entered the war. Its assault sent the UN armies reeling back past the 38th parallel, and a war that seemed would be over by Christmas turned into years of bloody stalemate.

Though ceasefire talks had begun in July 1951, the war dragged on. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, newly elected in 1952, decided after visiting Korea that it was time to apply enough pressure to force a peace. He began broadly hinting in public statements that nuclear weapons might be used if a ceasefire was not concluded.

lossy page1 1142px Korean_War_Peace_talks._Kaesong,_Korea_ _NARA_ _292622.tif Despite the nuclear blackmail, the death of Stalin in March 1953 and the resulting leadership shake up in the Soviet Union was probably the decisive factor in ending the war.The carnage finally ended with the Korean Armistice Agreement on July 27, 1953. A demilitarized zone was established separating the two countries along the 38th parallel that stands to this day.

It has often been labeled the “Forgotten War,” but over 36,000 Americans and millions of Koreans and Chinese died in a conflict noted for its utter brutality. Between US strategic bombing leveling most of North Korea, horrific war crimes committed by both sides, and cities changing hands multiple times, both North and South Korea were devastated. It ended in a draw. But if satellite imagery has anything to say, South Korea in the long run is lucky that the United States had its back.

Model of teeth with braces

For much of my childhood, around once a year or so, my parents would drive me across town to a new orthodontist’s office, where they’d receive yet another written recommendation for braces to send to our insurance provider. After the company inevitably declined to cover the cost, for any one of a dozen reasons—my teeth were moving too much, or they weren’t in enough disorder, or they were in too much disorder to make braces worthwhile without some surgery—we’d immediately start strategizing for the next year.

Today, some 4 million Americans are wearing braces, according to the American Association of Orthodontists, and the number has roughly doubled in the U.S. between 1982 and 2008. The dental braces we know today—a series of stainless-steel brackets fixed to each tooth and anchored by bands around the molars, surrounded by thick wire to apply pressure to the teeth—date to the early 1900s. But cultural and social concerns about crooked teeth are much older than that.

Some of the earliest medical writings speculate on the dangers of dental disorder, a byproduct of evolution that left homo sapiens with smaller jaws and narrower dental arches (to accommodate their larger cranial cavities and longer foreheads). In Hippocrates’s Corpus Hippocraticum, he notes that people with irregular palate arches and crowded teeth were “molested by headaches and otorrhea [discharge from the ear].” The Roman physician Aulus Cornelius Celsus recommended that children’s caregivers use a finger to apply daily pressure to new teeth in an effort to ensure proper position. Egyptian mummies have been found with gold bands around some of their teeth, which researchers believe may have been used to close dental gaps with catgut wiring.

Until relatively recently, though, tooth-straightening was a secondary concern among dentists; first was tooth decay. Before modern dentistry, dental pain was often attributed to either fabular tooth-worms or an imbalance of the four humoral fluids. The most common treatments were bloodletting, to drain the offending liquid from the gums or cheeks, or extraction. During the Middle Ages, tooth-drawing was a relatively easy vocation that anyone could learn and, with a little promotional savvy, a person could set up shop in a local market or public square. The trend continued for several centuries—in The Excruciating History of Dentistry, James Wynbrandt notes that there were around 100 working dentists in the United States in 1825, but more than 1,200 by 1840. The reason for the surge: After the financial panic of 1837, many of the nation’s newly unemployed mechanics and manual laborers turned to the crude art of tooth extraction.

The haphazard nature of early dentistry encouraged more serious practitioners to distinguish themselves by focusing on dentures. As The L.A. Times noted in a 2007 piece on the history of dentures, from ancient times until the 20th century, they were made from a wide variety of materials—including hippopotamus ivory, walrus tusk, and cow teeth. Pierre Fauchard, the 18th-century French physician sometimes described as the “father of modern dentistry,” was the first to keep his patients’ dentures in place by anchoring them to molars, formalizing one of the basic principles of contemporary braces. Fauchard developed a number of other techniques for straightening teeth, including filing down teeth that jutted too far above their neighbors and using a set of metal forceps, commonly called a “pelican,” to create space between overcrowded teeth. He also developed what many consider to be the first orthodontic appliance: the b andeau, a metallic band meant to expand a person’s dental arch, without necessarily straightening each tooth.

Early_dental_chair,_Shamrock,_TX_IMG_6151.JPG

Around the same time that Fauchard practiced, the desire for a symmetrical set of teeth was taking root among the wealthy in Europe and the U.S. Thomas Berdmore, the personal dentist to England’s King George III, made the case for both the medical and social benefits of a symmetrical set of teeth, writing that they “give a healthy juvenile air to the countenance, improve the tone of the voice, render pronunciation more agreeable and distinct, help mastication, and preserve the opposite teeth from growing prominent.”

In A Brief History of the Smile, Angus Trumble describes how these class-centric attitudes contributed to a cultural association between crooked teeth and moral turpitude. Painters of the period used the open mouth as a “convenient metaphor for obscenity, greed, or some other kind of endemic corruption,” he wrote:

Most teeth and open mouths in art belonged to dirty old men, misers, drunks, whores, gypsies, people undergoing experiences of religious ecstasy, dwarves, lunatics, monsters, ghost, the possessed, the damned, and—all together now—tax collectors, many of whom had gaps and holes where healthy teeth once were.

The American dentist Eugene S. Talbot, one of the early proponents of X-Rays in dentistry, argued that malocclusion—misalignment of the teeth—was hereditary and that people who suffered from it were “neurotics, idiots, degenerates, or lunatics.”

In the 20th century, tooth decay was finally tamed through advancements in microbiology, which established connections between cavities and diets heavy in sugar and processed flour. Especially in the U.S., as orthodontics advanced and tooth extraction became less common, a proud open-mouthed smile became the cultural norm. From cigarettes to dish soap, television commercials and magazine ads were punctuated with glinting smiles. Sharing a smile with someone wasn’t just good manners, but a sign that the smiler was a willing recipient of the wonders of modern medicine.

* * *

By the early 20th century, Edward Angle, an American pioneer in tooth “regulation,” had been awarded 37 patents for a variety of tools that he used to treat malocclusion, including a metallic arch expander (called the E-Arch) and the “edgewise appliance,” a metal bracket that many consider the basis for today’s braces. Angle sold all of these standardized parts, in various configurations, as the “Angle system.” Other orthodontists could purchase and use Angle’s inventions in their own practices, thus eliminating the need to design and produce appliances for each new patient.

Today’s orthodontic practices rely on equal parts individual diagnosis and mass-produced tool, often in pursuit of an appearance that’s medically unnecessary. Basic advances in brushing, flossing, and microbiology have largely defeated the problem of widespread tooth decay—yet the perceived problem of oral asymmetry has remained and, in many ways, intensified. The choice to leave one’s mouth in aesthetic disarray remains an implicit affront to medical consumerism.

“The smile has always been associated with restraint,” Trumble writes, “with the limitations upon behavior that are imposed upon men and women by the rational forces of civilization, as much as it has been taken as a sign of spontaneity, or a mirror in which one may see reflected the personal happiness, delight, or good humor of the wearer.” And so orthodontics persists to address a genuine medical necessity, but also (and more often) to enable unnecessary self-corrections.

With an often-unnecessary product—the perfect smile—as the basis of its livelihood, the orthodontics industry has embraced the placebo effect. “A great smile helps you feel better and more confident,” argues the website for the American Association of Orthodontists. “It can literally change how people see you—at work and in your personal life.”

Woman wearing Invisalign In recent years, however, this promise has collided with the high cost of orthodontics to foster a dangerous new subculture of home remedies for teeth straightening. Guided by YouTube videos and homeopathy websites, some people are attempting to align their own teeth with elastic string or plastic mold kits, an amateur approximation of what an orthodontist might do. This practice has become so widespread that The American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics issued a consumer alert, warning that such unsupervised procedures could lead to lesions around the root of a tooth and in some cases cause it to fall out completely. Excessive pressure can wreak havoc on a mouth and interfere with the root resorption necessary to anchor a tooth in its new position. Yet the popularity of the practice is, in some ways, a product of the orthodontics industry’s own marketing history, which has compensated for empirical uncertainty about its medical necessity by appealing to aesthetic concerns.

It certainly worked on me. When I was 21, just starting my senior year of college, my parents finally succeeded in navigating the bureaucratic maze of our family’s insurance company after years of rejection. I remember sitting in the examining rooms with the orthodontist who would finally apply my own braces, watching a digitally manipulated image of my face showing how two years of orthodontics might change it. I gazed at computer screen as the orthodontist walked me through all of the things that would be changed about my face, the collapsing wreckage of my lower teeth drawn into a clean arc. I tried to hold onto this image of my reordered face as the brackets were applied and the first uncomfortable sensation of tightening pressure began to radiate through my skull.

I was 24 when I finally had my braces taken off. After the removal, I walked unsteadily to my car through the orthodontist’s parking lot, struggling to stay upright. After almost three years of sensing constant pressure against my teeth, it felt like a 10-pound weight had been removed from the front of my face. The ground swayed beneath my feet and I moved slowly to make sure I wouldn’t trip. When I closed my mouth, my teeth felt unfamiliar, a landscape of little bones that met in places where they hadn’t before.

For a few days, chewing produced new and unexpected sensations in my gums. Each piece of food was a new experience, revealing qualities that I’d been numb to before. But after a week or so, normalcy returned. My meals were just meals again. Biting into an apple no longer felt like a moonwalk. Swishing water through the spaces between my teeth lost its thrill. Eventually, I forgot that my mouth had ever been different at all.

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