Exhilarated by seemingly endless success, contemptuous of her fleeing enemies, China makes the same tragic error of overconfidence that North Korea, and then the United Nations, had made before her. On New Year's Day, 1951, supported by violent mortar barrages, the CCF smashes across the 38th Parallel against feeble opposition.

With this, China changes from a nation coming to the aid of a desperate neighbor and becomes an aggressor attempting to crush an apparently helpless sovereign nation.

Millions of innocent people will pay the price for China's arrogant over-confidence, in suffering, as earlier innocents paid for our own.

Such is war.