Courtesy of Alice Boria
Key Points
- The Republic of Korea awarded Apopka veteran Louis Boria the Ambassador for Peace medal for his Korean War service.
- Boria received the medal during a Revisit Korea tour for 12 veterans funded by Korea's Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs.
- Boria described the 1950 Incheon landing that split North Korean lines as crucial despite military opposition due to weather concerns.
The Republic of Korea recently awarded Apopka veteran Louis “Lou” Boria the “Ambassador for Peace” medal in honor of his service in the Korean War.
“It is a great honor and pleasure to express the everlasting gratitude of the Republic of Korea and our people for the service you and your countrymen have performed in restoring and preserving our freedom and democracy,” said the proclamation from Minister of Patriots and Veterans Affairs Kwon Oh-eul. “In grateful recognition of your dedicated contributions, it is our privilege to proclaim you an ‘Ambassador for Peace’ with every good wish of people of the Republic of Korea. Let each of us reaffirm our mutual respect and friendship that they may endure for generations to come.”
Boria received the medal during his Revisit Korea tour, which brought 12 veterans to Korea for a week in late July at the expense of the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs. According to the ministry’s website, the tour includes visits to battle sites, the Seoul National Cemetery, Panmunjom and the War Memorial.
“There’s a famous picture of Incheon where some guys are putting up ladders against the seawall and climbing up, and the guy that went across the seawall first was a lieutenant, and he was a Spanish guy, and he was killed,” said Lou’s wife Alice Boria. “Lou was at the base of the ladder when that happened, so when we got there and saw that statue, it was really very poignant… He’s seen small ones in museums, but these were life-sized up against a real seawall, and it was very earth-shattering.”
Lou shared more about the Incheon beach landing and about his July trip at a Tuesday Foliage Sertoma Club of Apopka luncheon.
“We landed in Incheon, Korea, September the 16th, 1950, and my son was born during that time,” he said. “All the command military were against that landing. They said that it’s impossible with the weather… [General Douglas MacArthur] insisted on it, and it just cut the North Korean lines right in half.”
In a phone call with The Apopka Chief, Boria said he was “overwhelmed” when receiving the award, but it was also “awesome.”
“The thing that just made me happy was that I start to think about it, and it’s 76 years ago that I was there, and all of a sudden, somebody remembers, and it’s a great feeling,” he said. “I just couldn’t put it together that I was in a place, and it doesn’t exist anymore — these people made it into a beautiful country.”
Alice appreciated the respect the Korean people showed her husband, noting that international respect for the United States amounts to “a whole lot more than what you may think.”
“We ran into teenagers at the museum, and they would see that the guys had their veterans’ badges on, and they would come over to Lou and say, ‘We want to thank you because if it hadn’t been for America and the U.N., we wouldn’t have what we have today, and we would be living in a Communist country,’” she said. “I wish we had that much confidence in our own country that we would do the same thing.”