Moonbeam Kupka was only 4 when the war
began, but her memories are chillingly vivid.
Fleeing Seoul, her family was part of “a milling,
screaming mass of humanity” that choked
the roads. The cries of wounded soldiers and
terrified children echo in her mind. “Those
memories never fade,” she says. “But we were
lucky to survive when so many died.”
At war’s end, her family regrouped and
reconnected with relatives feared lost. In 1968,
when Moonbeam was a university student,
she met a handsome young U.S. Army officer
from Minnesota. Slowly, secretly, they fell
in love, angering her old-fashioned father.
Forty-nine years later, the youngest of Mike
and Moonbeam Kupka’s three accomplished
children, Johnathon, is the commander of the
U.S. Army’s largest battalion. He helped soften a
stubborn grandfather’s heart.