Korea: Summer 2000.

[pmulcahy11b]

That's true, there's still just an Armistice -- the longest-lasting one in the world.

Late-1980s and early 1990s (T2K v1, I guess) short-term help would have come from the 25th ID in Hawaii, the 82nd Airborne, 7th ID in California, and later the 9th ID in Washington, as well as the Marines in Japan and Okinawa, and the Special Forces unit in Okinawa. Help from elsewhere at the time was dicey, but might have included the British, Australians, and New Zealanders; there was an outside chance for Singaporean and Japanese help (the latter very dicey -- the Japanese were really big on neutrality at the time and the ROKs still held a grudge against the Japanese for the treatment they got during World War 2). Air support would have come out of Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines, and three carrier task forces might have shown up rather quickly, including battleships, which were still operational at the time.

In T2K, a lot of that help would not have been available, as they were deployed elsewhere. Korea would have become a forgotten corner of the war, with the troops there largely on their own. But balancing this, the Chinese in T2K would have stayed out of a PRK invasion of South Korea, and the Russians may also have decided they had too much to handle with a war in China and Europe and stayed out of it as well.

An untapped asset in T2K is South Korean guerrilla activity. In the late 1980s, there were some 18,000 Korean Vietnam vets in South Korea -- and South Korean forces were known to be especially vicious in Vietnam. One CSM I had in the Army said, "The ROKs would go into a village, and when they were done, nothing was left." These vets could become trainers for ROK guerrillas or even regular forces drafted into the Army.