“But we got the better deal.”

And no one could disagree.

Astronaut John Glenn was invited to speak. He didn’t come.

Tom Ward of Jamestown came instead. An Army Ranger who spent two years and three months in a prison camp in North Korea during the Korean War, filled in — and moved smoothly from a down-home, entertaining spoof of himself (“Before I got here I was extremely nervous, and now I see the TV cameras and the mayor and I’m scared to death. Where’s the foxhole?”) to a serious battle tale with a surprise punch line that caught the audience in a collective gasp.

But nobody suspected it was going to turn serious when he turned to a man in the audience.

“Jim,” he said, “bring my valise up here.”

The man handed him a blue plastic grocery bag, and he played around a little, pulling out a VFW magazine (“some good articles in this”) and a copy of a Korean War era Life magazine with Debbie Reynolds on the front (“Man, I was in lovvvve with Debbie Reynolds!”).

And then, suddenly, he was serious.

“Korea never should have happened,” he said. It should never have been divided, but the Russians got into World War II six days before Japan surrendered and dictated the direction of the division of Korea while America was cutting back on its military forces and soldiers were getting married and having babies.

He was getting to a story that never got into the history books.

“We were cut back to the bones, and we weren’t ready when the Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950. The first American forces began arriving in Korea on June 29 and were nearly wiped out.”

But a few more had arrived — including a 14-year-old boy who had lied about his age and passed for 17 to get into the Army — when word came that a possible enemy guerrilla band was roaming around in the hills near Hadong.

“The general told the colonel to take his green troops — a total of 700 and some —and find it,” Ward said. “It would be good field experience.”

But signs immediately indicated it could be more than rag tag guerrillas.

“A patrol went out the night before and went almost to Hadong. They reported they saw enemy cigarettes in the mountains.” Tiny blinking red lights were everywhere.

The warning was ignored.

“Could they have been lightning bugs?” Ward asks. “Was it stupidity? Or arrogance?”

Then a wagonload of wounded South Koreans showed up.

“They said there were many North Korean soldiers up there. That warning was ignored. They walked into an ambush.

“This one never reached the history books, but the whole 700 of them were surrounded by a horseshoe of North Koreans. They started to fire, and it was slaughter, slaughter, slaughter.

“Instead of rag tag guerrillas, it was the 6th North Korean Division, at least 12,000 hard troops, and when they opened fire it was like shooting ducks in a barrel. The kids in that unit had never fired their weapons. They weren’t ready for combat.

“A total of 313 lost their lives. Wounded? Nobody knows how many. About 100 were captured.

“Later they were found, their hands tied behind their backs, killed,” Ward said.

That kid “got experience all right. He got some experience!” And by the time a soldier, handing him a message, said, “Hey, sergeant, your mama wants you,” he had been in the Army for two years.

Ward hesitated.

He looked at the man on the second row who had handed him him his plastic bag-valise.

“That young man was from North Carolina, and it’s my brother, Jim. Stand up, Jim.”

Jim stood up — and more than 100 people in the social hall gasped simultaneously.

When he got out, Ward says, “he was 16. I’d like you to give him a big hand.”

It was a very big hand. And there were some very wet eyes.

“You want to say a few words, Jim? No? He’s looking for a fox hole right now.”

The 29th Regimental Combat Team, for all practical purposes ceased to exist. The soldiers who lived were put in the 27th regiment of the 25th Infantry Division.

The story has never made it into a history book, but 50 years later Jim Ward remembers it clearly.

“I didn’t see any of the enemy in that battle,” he said later. “We saw nothing but bullets and dying and explosions. I didn’t know what to expect. We pulled all our vehicles around, and all of a sudden I saw our first one explode.” All exploded.

“We were there trying to dig in, and the word came just to move out. Believe me, we were moving out the best way we could. Some of us finally worked our way out. Some didn’t. We marched all night long, about 40 miles, helping to carry the wounded and all ... It was a very bad battle.”

The story made that VFW magazine Tom Ward had pulled out of the plastic bag.

And his brother, Jim, made that Life magazine with Debbie Reynolds on the cover.

Headlined “An Old Soldier Retires at 16,” it says James Ward put in two years, including five months of front line-combat duty, and rose to the responsible and hazardous position of squad leader when his father told the Army he was only 16. Two years before he had bamboozled a recruiting sergeant and gotten in.

But now they’d found him out, so he went home, Life said, “plunked down his barracks bag, snubbed out his cigar and started making arrangements to go back to school.”

Tom Ward’s talk and his brother’s surprise presence at the event were the emotional highlight of a day full of emotion. Beginning at 10 a.m. about 200 veterans and their families came and went, reading newspaper headlines and stories displayed to create a Korean war tour and items displayed on tables by by veterans Charles Blankenship and Gonzalee Misenheimer.

Korean native J.H. Chung, pastor of First Presbyterian Korean Church of Greensboro, gave the invocation and told the group about 3 million Koreans lost their lives and another 10 million families were separated during the war. In their memory and in honor of the veterans, his church presented the Medical Center with a gift of $500.

Salisbury Mayor Susan Kluttz declared the day Korean Veterans Recognition Day.

“If it weren’t for you,” she told the veterans, “the things happening in Korea right now might not be happening. There might not be a South Korea.”

Even though the Korean War has been called the Forgotten War, most Americans will not forget the 54,000 servicemen who lost their lives there nor the Korean war veterans, she said. Medical Center Director Timothy May said the summit of the two Koreas focussed attention on the Korean War and the words on the Korean memorial in Washington that “Freedom is not free.”

The conflict in Korea should be viewed not as a forgotten war but as the free world’s first common stand against communism and as the beginning of the end of the global cold war.

May also presented Jessie Howard Horn with a plaque in memory of her husband, killed on August 22, 1950, and the first black soldier from Rowan County killed in that war.

He would have appreciated being remembered, she said, “and I thank you so very, very much.”

Closing the program, Bob Lee, chairman of the Veterans Serving Veterans group which arranged the event, pointed out that three military funerals were taking place simultaneously with the observance of the Korean war anniversary — at 1, 2 and 3 p.m.