Very nice piece and I certainly agree that the history is wildly abused by ideologues on all sides. My fellow Americans know surprisingly little about the Korean war or the unbelievable savagery of it. Your description seems accurate but I think you got a decimal point wrong. North Korea's entire population at the time was only about 11 million and the Chinese involvement peaked at about 3 million troops. We are generally believed to have killed about 1/3 of the population of North Korea, which is an astoundingly high death rate, but it's impossible for us to have killed 25 million. 1/3 would be four million people. Most died of starvation caused by the bombing. However, if you misplaced a decimal, your number would be 2.5 million, which is closer to the accepted number, and in fact, might even understate it. Even the incredible suffering of Russia in WW2 doesn't come close (about 15% of the Russian people died in that war.) I don't mean to bad-mouth my people, but the typical American's knowledge of foreign affairs and history is ludicrously bad.