Sixty years ago, another war passed into the history books, leaving those directly affected to remember it forever but others to largely leave it all behind as the world moved on.
It was the Korean War, a war so often forgotten that guest speakers at the Returned and Services League have been known to jump straight from the Second World War to Vietnam.
Yet, the effects of that war -- and its armistice -- are alive and ... not so well today.
Ron Sutton looks back, starting with a former Australian prisoner of war from Victor Gentile's documentary Convictions, remembering the day it ended for him.
"I was feeling pretty miserable and pretty ... uh, pretty lonely. You had no-one to talk to, and I was in a lot of pain. The plaster was sort of contracting and really hurting. And this Chinese fellow came in, Chinese soldier, and sat down on the bed. And he ... cradled my head in his arms and started singing, uh, Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.
Sixty years ago on Saturday, the word the injured prisoner had long awaited, like thousands of other soldiers and loved ones from Korea to Australia and beyond, finally came.
On July the 27th, 1953, three years and a month after it started, the Korean War stopped.
United States president Dwight Eisenhower announced the dramatic news to his nation and, in turn, the world that the warring sides had reached a truce.
"My fellow citizens, tonight we greet with prayers of thanksgiving the official news that an armistice was signed almost an hour ago in Korea. It will quickly bring to an end the fighting between United Nations forces and the communist armies."
And yet, here we are 60 years later with North Korea threatening nuclear war and with tensions as high as ever along the border with South Korea.
Three generations of North Korean leaders have kept the region ever on edge.
To East Asian security analyst Ron Huisken, a former senior diplomat now at the Australian National University, that edge can be traced, in part, to the day 60 years ago.
The armistice talks involved the North Koreans, the United States on behalf of the UN force backing South Korea, and China, whose forces were fighting on behalf of North Korea.
Dr Huisken says one party that needed to be there was missing.
"South Korea was not directly a party. That has set the North Korean national narrative, if you like, that the South is an illegitimate puppet regime, that (the North Koreans are) the only legitimate government on the Korean Peninsula, they should hold the seat in the UN, and so on. And, above all, 'We will do no business of any consequence directly with those guys in the South. We will work directly with the US.' And that's become such a deeply entrenched part of their national mythology, if you like, in the (thinking of) Pyongyang that it's buggered everything up."
Could anyone have forced anything different at the time?
Dr Huisken suggests they could have and should have.
"Where you have agreement, in a sense, between China and the United States that there'd been enough fighting, if you like, these big guys can make things happen if they want to. And perhaps if the US had insisted on getting all the principals' signatures on this document, maybe pushing it from an armistice into a peace agreement, you would have had a stronger semblance of normality, or rationality, on the Peninsula."
The full background to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's nuclear threats today begins, perhaps, in the last days of the Second World War.
Japan had ruled the Korean Peninsula since the early years of the 20th Century, but defeat in the Second World War spelled the end of that.
As part of an understanding between the former Soviet Union and the United States in the war's dying days, the Soviets moved into the north as U-S troops advanced from the south.
The dividing line was set at the 38th parallel, and the two countries agreed, despite Korean protests, to establish a five-year waiting period for independence.
The Koreans kept pushing for self-rule, though, and, in 1948, after just three years, the United States agreed to move it forward.
A nationalist, staunchly anti-communist government formed in the south, the north responding with a nationalist, Communist government under rebel leader Kim Il-sung.
US troops pulled out a year later, leaving behind a poorly equipped South Korean force, and, in June 1950, after several border skirmishes, the North Koreans invaded.
They quickly took control of all but essentially two southern cities, Pusan and Taegu, before US occupation troops from Japan, then the rest of the UN forces, could repel them.
The man who served as Australia's official historian on the war for more than a decade, Professor Robert O'Neill, says that success until the UN intervention also explains a lot.
"I think the two halves of Korea would have been united under North Korean domination and that this is what has made the outcome of the Korean War so unacceptable for the North ever since. And I think it helps to explain why Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un have all strutted the world stage threatening to return to conflict."
But Professor O'Neill says the successful UN intervention left another major mark on the world in a different way.
While soldiers in Australia, in the United States and in many of the other 20 countries that contributed to the UN effort think of Korea as The Forgotten War, he says it was pivotal.
"It consolidated the authority of the United Nations. We'd been through a very weak period in international order between the two world wars. The League of Nations just was not up to withstanding the stresses and strains that it was subjected to, and it virtually fell apart in the late '30s. (US) President (Franklin) Roosevelt thought this kind of prospect was unacceptable, and so the Americans got together with the British and then the Russians and decided to set up a new system for maintaining world order, the United Nations. We began the post-Second World War era with an international body which could use force to put down aggression."
Ironically, the UN role in Korea could so easily have been different -- or even absent -- if not for a simple twist of fate.
The Soviets had been boycotting the UN Security Council meetings for months in June 1950, protesting the Chinese seat should belong to the government in Beijing, not Taiwan.
They had veto power in the council, but, in their absence, two days after North Korea invaded, the council passed a resolution recommending member states help the South.
By September, the UN forces had moved the North's forces all the way back across the 38th parallel, potentially ending a three-month war that had been deadly enough.
But that was when UN commander Douglas MacArthur, a US hero of the Second World War, talked President Harry Truman into letting him keep driving north.
General MacArthur thought he could unite Korea, but when the UN forces neared the Chinese border, China responded with what some have called the biggest ambush in history.
Three years later, estimates suggest almost a million South Koreans, almost a million Chinese, 600,000 North Koreans and almost 200,000 UN soldiers lay dead or wounded.
And all was back to the 38th parallel.
In the midst of that extended war, President Truman dismissed General MacArthur, and his announcement addressed another, wider dimension to the Korean War.
"I believe that we must try to limit the war to Korea for these vital reasons: to make sure that the precious lives of our fighting men are not wasted, to see that the security of our country and the Free World is not needlessly jeopardised, and to prevent a Third World War. A number of events have made it evident that General MacArthur did not agree with that policy."
A Third World War -- that was the overriding fear in the decade after the Second World War.
Just as the United States and China wanted to avoid further war, the United States and the Soviet Union had tried hard to avoid a full-out confrontation over Korea.
Korea, then, led to a Cold War era of proxy wars, where, historians suggest, the superpowers largely let others do their fighting to avoid a direct confrontation.
But Dr Huisken, the former diplomat, suggests it also taught those powers to get involved early, the lesson being that, perhaps, it would help avoid that big confrontation.
"Maybe Korea was decisive (in thinking) that, 'if we turn a blind eye to* what look like trivial little excursions, then it might encourage the other side to do something where we would have no choice but to fight and where the risk of escalation would be great. Safety first, we need to stop everything from happening if we possibly can -- not allow little things, because they are little, to slip away, because, next week, it might be something bigger than both of us can handle.'"
For one day, though, on July the 27th, 1953, there was a feeling of an end to it all.
And World News Australia Radio will be broadcasting a special program-length feature on Thursday July 25, at 6.10 am and 6.10 pm, to mark the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended hostilities on the Korean peninsula.
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