Korean War Memory-Sweeping For Land Mines

One of my uncles died a few years ago of prostate cancer.  He had been in the Korean War, but up until about a year before he died he didn't say much about what had happened there.  Suddenly one day he started talking about his experiences.  He told me that up until then he couldn't remember much about his experiences in Korea.  He said that for some reason--maybe the cancer or the  pain medication he was using--the memories came flooding back.  When they came back they were as clear as if the events had just happened.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of any of this.  This is my recollection of fifty-plus year old memories of a dying man.  

My uncle was in a front-line unit, facing the Chinese.  His battalion went into a relatively stable part of the frontline to replace a Turkish unit.  The Turks were an elite unit and apparently scared the bejeebers out of the Chinese on the other side, so my uncle's battalion tried to pretend that the Turks were still there for a while so the Chinese would leave them alone.  That lasted for a few days, but then the Chinese figured it out.

In any case, for some reason the battalion was slated to do a local offensive, but there was a mine-field in front of their position.  Part of the mines were American, but the Chinese had apparently also laid some mines.  My uncle got picked to map out the mine field with a hand-held mine-detector.  Not a fun task under any circumstances, but he went out and worked his way across the mine-field.  The noise from the detector would change a little and he would mark the spot on his map, then go on. 

Finally he got to the other side, where the end of the mine-field was marked by barbed wire and metal posts.  At that point, he accidentally swung the mine detector close to one of the metal posts.  No change in the sound.  That was a problem.  Since the mine detector worked by detecting metal and it wasn't detecting metal, it was apparently defective.  He tried the detector on several posts.  Still nothing.

So, there he was on the wrong side of a mine-field with a defective mine-detector.  Not good.  Even 50+ years later I could see the fear in his eyes as he relived that moment, and the subsequent moments as he worked his way back to his unit on his hands and knees, feeling for tripwires and knowing that at any time a wrong move might cause a mine to spring out of the ground to head height and spray ball-bearing-sized slugs in all directions, killing or maiming him.

He finally did make it back unharmed, and if I recall the story correctly, didn't even get an apology from the officer who sent him out with the defective mine-detector.  The local offensive got called off for some unrelated reason anyway, so the whole risk of life and limb was totally pointless, at least from his perspective.

As to why he couldn't remember that incident for all of those years and then suddenly could, I'm not a psychologist, but I'm guessing that my uncle's mind must have had some kind of mechanism to protect him from some of the things that he saw and did that as a guy in his early twenties he couldn't cope with.  The memories stayed buried until the trauma of his approaching death or the powerful painkilling drugs he was on unlocked them.