This study intends to analyze recent South Korean perception of the Korean War in view of characters of memory. The main observations can be summed up as follows. Memory is unreliable unless corresponding reality may confirm it. Since over time reality becomes fuzzy, memory also weaken in direct proportion. Also, only what is directly experienced or witnessed is retained in human memory for certain. Therefore, it is natural that memory of the Korean War that was fought in the early 1950s has increasingly weakened. The war remains a “living history” for the gene- ration who experienced it, compared with a “fossilized history” for the generation who has no experience or memory of it. The latter generation is virtually ignorant of the war. One's memory is closely related to past perceptual experience. No or little previous perceptional experience, in particular learning, makes memory almost impossible. Knowledge can not be fully acquired without learning. Since the Korean War has been poorly described in elementary, middle, and high school textbooks and its instruction vague, “Korean War illiteracy” is prevalent among the younger generation. When human beings perceive an event to happen, they perceive it from a certain perspective. It is hard to make sense of the very notion of perceiving something from no point of view or perspective at all. In normal circumstances, a perceived event is presented to human beings after being filtered through their own perspectives. This principle is applied to South Korean perception of the Korean War. There have been two kinds of Korean War in South Korean minds. While the “progressives” see the war as a “war for reunification led by North Korea,” the “conservatives” understand it as a “fratricidal war started by North Korea's unprovoked invasion of the South.”