The Korean War: A History (24 page)

The
Times
did not produce this story, but rather front-paged an Associated Press account of the massacre. In subsequent days and weeks it did no follow-up reporting, to my knowledge, except periodically to update its readership on what the Associated Press was saying about the reaction in the Pentagon, or Seoul, the announcement of an investigation into the survivor’s claims, and the like. Two months after this story broke, Doug Struck, a reporter for
The Washington Post
, learned that civilians were huddled in the railroad tunnel for as much as three days, while American soldiers repeatedly returned: Chong Ku-hun, then seventeen years of age, told Struck, “‘They were checking every wounded person and shooting them if they moved.’ Other soldiers climbed down toward a drainage pipe where dozens of villagers had taken shelter and began shooting into families, according to the accounts of other survivors.” Yang Hae-suk, then a girl of thirteen, was also in the tunnel: “Suddenly there were planes and bombs. My uncle covered his child, and I heard him say, ‘Oh, my God.’ I looked and saw his intestines had come out. The bullet had passed through his back and killed his daughter.” A few moments later the young teenager
also got hit and lost her left eye. Mr. Struck said investigators “face the delicate task of measuring a dirty war by standards that officials here say were violated by all sides during the three-year conflict.”
⁴
This account carried the story a very troubling step further: not only were the American GIs ordered to shoot at civilians, they returned again and again to make sure they were all dead. This suggests, of course, that they wanted to assure themselves that there would be
no
survivors to tell the tale of Nogun-ri.

This element of the Korean War has disappeared from the collective memory, as if Vietnam were the only intervention where “My Lais” occurred. But in 1950, the people in “white pajamas” and what they provoked in Americans was as accessible as the neighborhood barbershop reading table. For example, John Osborne of
Life
told readers of the August 21, 1950, issue that American officers had ordered GIs to fire on clusters of civilians; a soldier said, “It’s gone too far when we are shooting children.” It was a new kind of war, Osborne wrote, “blotting out of villages where the enemy
may
be hiding; the shelling of refugees who
may
include North Koreans.” As I. F. Stone put it, the air raids and the sanitized reports issued to the press “reflected not the pity which human feeling called for, but a kind of gay moral imbecility, utterly devoid of imagination—as if the flyers were playing in a bowling alley, with villages for pins.”
⁵

The military historian Walter Karig, writing in
Collier’s
, likened the fighting to “the days of Indian warfare” (a common analogy); he also thought Korea might be like the Spanish civil war—a testing ground for a new type of conflict, which might be found later in places such as Indochina and the Middle East. “Our Red foe scorns all rules of civilized warfare,” Karig wrote, “hid[ing] behind women’s skirts”; he then presented the following colloquy:

Eric Larrabee, writing in
Harper’s
, began by quoting an English captain who subdued the Pequot Indians in 1836: “the tactics of the natives … far differ from Christian practice.” He recalled the reflections of a British officer at Lexington during the American revolution:

A marine in Korea told him, “In Tarawa you could at least see the enemy. Here the gooks hide in the bushes.” What was a limited war for Americans, Larrabee wrote, was a people’s war for Koreans (much like the American war against the British), and he said it could not be fought with a “brutal and senseless display of technical superiority”—instead, without using the terms, he called for the development of rapidly deployable special forces to fight the people’s wars of the future, where the object would be winning the people over to our side.
⁷

Reginald Thompson wrote that war correspondents found the campaign for the South “strangely disturbing,” different from World War II in its guerrilla and popular aspect. “There were few who dared to write the truth of things as they saw them.” GIs “never spoke of the enemy as though they were people, but as one might speak of apes.” Even among correspondents, “every man’s
dearest wish was to kill a Korean. ‘Today … I’ll get me a gook.’” GIs called Koreans gooks, he thought, because “otherwise these essentially kind and generous Americans would not have been able to kill them indiscriminately or smash up their homes and poor belongings.”
⁸

Americans still seem to have difficulty looking with open eyes on the record of the Korean War. Why did
The New York Times
and other papers find massacre stories fit to print in 1999, but not fit to print for the previous forty-nine years? In one sense it
is
a “forgotten war”; U.S. reporters of the first rank often know nothing about it. Forgotten, unknown, never-known: and thus Nogun-ri becomes interesting and salient, because it suggests to reporters of the younger generation not Korea but the Vietnam War and the My Lai massacre—and we thought things like that happened only in Vietnam (and really, only once). So, in this curious American lexicon, civilian massacres—about which one could read in
Life
in the summer of 1950—disappear into oblivion because of a false construction of the nature of the Korean War; they get lost for a sufficiently long time, such that when they resurface they appear to contradict much of the received wisdom on this war.

Art Hunter surely knew the truth of what happened in Nogun village so many years ago, but why did it haunt him? I think it is because a young man on the giving end of a rifle intuits a fundamental human truth about warfare, that the soldier is there to kill, but also to save and protect:

The author of this moving statement went on to say that “the traditions of fighting men are long and honorable, based upon the noblest
of human traits—sacrifice.” He was General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.
⁹

When we examine these events more closely they help us to unravel certain truths about the Korean War. What happened in Nogun-ri grew out of the legacy of the suppressed aspirations of Koreans in 1945; local guerrillas in 1950 were remnants of the communal hopes of Koreans when they were liberated from Japan. Nogun village is located a couple of miles down the road from the county seat of Yongdong, in a remote and mountainous region where the borders of three provinces meet, and where a strong, indigenous left wing emerged just after Japanese imperialism collapsed in Korea in August 1945. A county people’s committee took power from the Japanese, and then two months later watched as American civil affairs teams retrieved the reins of government from it, as part of the establishment of the U.S. Military Government. The Americans on the scene quickly reemployed Koreans who had served in the colonial police, and of course suppressed the people’s committee. But the committee kept coming back to power, according to internal American reports. The U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps found that Yongdong still had a strong people’s committee in the autumn of 1948, at the time of the Yosu rebellion, and guerrilla war emerged in and around Yongdong, long before the ostensible “Korean War” began.
¹⁰
An American doctor named Clesson Richards ran a Salvation Army hospital in Yongdong from 1947 until leaving just before the war. “Guerrilla warfare was around us all the time,” he told a reporter. “We had many Commies as patients.… The police would keep an eye on them, grill them and when they had all possible information, take them out and stand them before a firing squad. This wall was near the hospital. We could hear the men being shot.” This he said matter-of-factly, since
in Dr. Richards’s opinion “the Commies were ruthless” (although they “had no anti-foreign feeling and did not bother us”). Americans such as KMAG officer James Hausman directed much of the counterinsurgency in 1948–49, and knew Yongdong county well as a hotbed of resentment and insurrection—it was long called a “red county”—while noting that all the guerrillas were indigenous and had no direction from North Korea. Rather, their grievances harkened back to the shattered hopes of liberation in 1945, and the extreme poverty of the tenant farmers in the area.
¹¹
But when the conventional warfare opened in June 1950, this history meant that Yongdong was targeted as a dangerous place for Americans.

Nogun-ri is a very old village in Korean records, the earliest mention in gazetteers coming in the eleventh century. With the typical landholding patterns of the 1940s in which families would have owned land going back centuries (usually to the time of the warlord Hideyoshi’s invasions in the 1590s, when gazetteers say Nogun village was laid waste), it is not surprising that most people in this ancient village did not want to move out of their homes, in spite of American and South Korean demands that they do so; this would mean leaving not just the land, but the ancestral tombs that dot the hills near Korean villages.

In July 2008 the world media heralded the arrest of “the world’s most wanted war criminal,” the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. He had been in hiding for thirteen years, ever since he was charged with genocide by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague for his role in the massacre of some eight thousand Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. These events were subsequently termed “Europe’s worst slaughter of civilians since World War II.”
¹²
Fifty-eight years earlier, in another murderous July, as the North Korean People’s Army bore down upon the city
of Taejon, south of Seoul, police authorities removed political prisoners from local jails, men and boys along with some women, massacred them, threw them into open pits, and dumped the earth back on them. Somewhere between four thousand and seven thousand died, and their stories remained buried for half a century. American officers stood idly by while this slaughter went on, photographing it for their records but doing nothing to stop it. A few months later the JCS classified the photos, not to be released until 1999. Then official American histories blamed the massacre on the Communists.

South Korea has illustrated that mutual understanding and rapprochement between enemies needs to be preceded by a process of truth and reconciliation; that is, a scrupulous, penetrating, forensic look at the past that investigates and acknowledges buried and suppressed aspects of history. And so, mostly unbeknownst to the American people or press, the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission has dredged up and verified the massacres of tens of thousands of its own citizens by the Syngman Rhee regime (including one that appears to have been larger than the Taejon massacre, at Changwon
¹³
), various villages blotted out by American napalm (in the
South)
, and has reexamined massacres by North Korean and local Communists (these were the cases endlessly propagandized since the war ended).

The Koreans found their primary model in the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa, which defined that vexing term, “truth,” in at least four ways: forensic truth (dig up and examine the bodies; forensic evidence is “embodied memory”: violence is written, inscribed, even performed on the body, living or dead
¹⁴
); eyewitness truth (let the victims speak); scholarly truth (historians and archival documents); and perpetrators’ truth—get them on the stand, let them speak too, and then let the others respond. It is a method for letting all the relevant parties have their say, for achieving a social or “dialogue” truth, a healing or restorative truth, a way to allocate justice and assess punishment, all in the interest of reconciliation rather than revenge or self-justification. South Africa adopted its commission in 1995, predicated on public deliberations, truth established in these ways, official investigations using fair procedures, testimony from planners, perpetrators, and victims alike; and amnesty for those who disclosed the full facts and recognized their complicity.
¹⁵
The same kind of inquiry is needed into American massacres such as Nogun-ri, the unrelenting firebombing of the North, and one of the most astonishing cover-ups in postwar U.S. history, the black-and-white reversal of the truth of what happened in Taejon.