August 2000
Pusan, South Korea
Her hair was ashen now and short, her body arthritic and halting. The ribbon of red and yellow silk had disappeared a lifetime ago. But the face, below the sad eyes, still bore the proud cheekbones of the pigtailed girl.
“My mother comes to me more often these days,” Park Hee-sook said. She wept gently. Her daughter-in-law held her hand. “I think I’m seeing things, and that means I’ve lived enough, that I don’t have many days left.”
When alone at her son’s home in Pusan, she said, she would suddenly see her long-dead mother at the trestle, a small figure in the tunnel, face covered with dust and streaked with sweat, rocking her dead daughter’s child on her back. “I can hear my mother calling the baby’s name over and over, trying to soothe her, to stop her from crying.”
Even in daytime, Hee-sook would see the heaps of dead before her. She would feel her father’s disintegrating flesh, sticky in her hands, and wonder whether her mother became food for birds. Her chin would shake uncontrollably at times. “I’m alive but I’m already seeing scenes from hell. It just doesn’t go away.” Under a neurologist’s care, she was taking nine pills each night to help her sleep and fight off the visions.
“Often I just want to grab Americans by the throat.… I want to ask them why they killed my family,” said Hee-sook, now in her mid-sixties. Old soldiers shouldn’t go to prison, she said, “but they should repent. Some say war is war and it’s dirty. But still, what’s wrong is wrong.”
In that lonely time long ago, living alone in her dead parents’ mud-walled house, the orphaned girl struggled to bring in the family harvests of tobacco and rice. In January 1951, she entrusted her father’s land to his cousin, whom she called “Uncle,” and was married off through the intercession of Im Ke Ri villagers to a man from the nearby village of Yangkang. He was a good man, with whom she had a son and daughter, but he died young, at forty-nine.
The older woman’s mind turned back to the day when she journeyed to meet her in-laws for the first time, a poor seventeen-year-old bride with a single set of clothing. It was the day after her wedding, and in the wooden sedan chair she wept the whole way. “Finally my uncle stopped the sedan and warned me he wouldn’t go with me if I kept crying.… I couldn’t have been sadder. My heart was crushed.” On the eve of a new life, Park Hee-sook could think of nothing but No Gun Ri.
* * *
By the time the Americans, Chinese and Koreans stopped fighting in the summer of 1953, most of South Korea was a wasteland of burned villages, bombed-out towns and cities, roadsides littered with the rusted hulks of trucks and tanks, bridges down, rail lines severed, factories and schools flattened. The fishing fleet in this maritime country had been wrecked. More than five million people relied on outside relief; half of those were homeless. Along with food, thousands of tons of used clothing and shoes were shipped in. The war had created some 100,000 orphans and 100,000 widows. Many others never knew what happened to their husbands or wives, and many languished for years, not remarrying, in the fading hope of finding them. Hundreds of thousands, especially those from North Korea, never saw their loved ones again.
American aid, some $1 billion between 1954 and 1960, helped in the country’s slow resurrection, rebuilding railroads and power stations, roads and bridges and schools. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops remained in South Korea after the armistice. Supplying their needs—from basic commodities to service workers to bar girls—became a major economic activity. Black-market trading in goods smuggled off U.S. bases swelled into a vast underground economy.
President Syngman Rhee’s government grew still more autocratic. In 1954, it forced another election bill through the National Assembly, this time allowing Rhee to run for as many presidential terms as he desired. In 1956, he was elected to a third term. The dictatorial leader took to executing his political opponents as alleged collaborators with North Korea.
The regime grew still more corrupt as well. A few business families colluding with Rhee became rich in the “white industry,” cornering the market in surplus U.S. sugar, flour and cotton sent to South Korea. The government controlled the banks and funneled loans to its favorites. The economy stagnated; in 1960, South Korea’s per-capita income still remained near the bottom worldwide.
In this bleak landscape, small things loomed large. For the surviving villagers of Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri, the arrival of movies—silent films in a tent amid the ruins of Yongdong—was a milestone of the early postwar period. Silence descended elsewhere as well those evenings, over all the towns and villages, as a nightly curfew took effect at 10 P.M. in the continuing campaign by government forces against communist guerrillas who clung to the highlands of South Korea. The last two guerrilla leaders surrendered in 1955, but stragglers in the Chiri Mountains clashed with police as late as 1963.
The insurgencies, the mass political executions, the indiscriminate killings of the war itself—all the bloodshed since the late 1940s led South Koreans in the 1950s to describe their nation, a land of mass graves, as a land full of han, of hearts crying out against injustices done to the dead.
No Gun Ri villagers remembered local farmers in the 1960s tilling a hillside beside the trestle and turning up many bones. They were thrown away, some said; others said they were sold to lepers, who believed bone had healing power.
The trestle was a forbidding presence to its neighbors. “It was a frightening place for village women like me,” recalled Lee Won-hee, an elderly No Gun Ri resident. “When it rained, we could see ghost flames flickering in the tunnel.”
Hon bul, or ghost flames, were a deeply rooted notion in Korean lore. They may have been caused when phosphorous from bones, kicked up by wind, flickered in the moonlight. Others believe they were a hallucination caused by malnutrition. Whatever the reality, the “flames” in the hills and valleys of the south became associated, in the postwar days, with the restless dead of Korea.
* * *
Chung Eun-yong, a policeman again, was unhappy with his job. The police had little respect among the people, and the wages were so poor that Sun-yong’s parents sometimes had to send them rice for their larder. But in 1954 Eun-yong managed to build a modest house in Taejon for his growing family. Sun-yong had borne him a new daughter, Koo-sook, in 1952, and then a son, Koo-do, in 1955.
The young couple could finally smile; their lives had begun again. But they could not escape the pain of the past. While others welcomed the warm breath of spring and its blossoms, Sun-yong dreaded each turn of the seasons. “Summer was no longer the same,” she said. “When the summer came, the memory revived,” with its wrenching images, of Koo-pil’s bloody foot, of his thin hair stirred by the breeze as he lay dead.
The guilt grew inside Eun-yong year by year. “I was a cowardly father.… I left my family to the killers.… I was ashamed to be alive.” He thought about what might have been. “I stopped and rested in that tunnel on my way south! How could I know what would happen there in a couple of days?” Sun-yong did not blame her husband. “He might well have died, too,” she said. “It’s only God’s grace that saved him. Five in my family died.”
Eun-yong took to frequenting a Presbyterian church in Taejon in search of spiritual support. But within the peacefulness of its walls, amid the words of Christian forgiveness, han still burned inside him. It found its release, with the rest of South Korea, in 1960.
President Rhee’s tactics had grown increasingly heavy-handed, climaxing with widespread vote-rigging suspected in his election to a fourth term in 1960. Students took to the streets in huge protests, first in Taegu and Masan down south, and then, in April, in Seoul. Rhee declared martial law and troops opened fire on pro-democracy crowds, killing 180 and injuring 6,000 across the country. But the upheaval finally drove him from power on April 26, 1960. The eighty-five-year-old strongman, disgraced in his homeland, retreated to a U.S. exile in Hawaii.
His downfall led to a brief “spring” of political liberalization in South Korea, when labor unions, led by leftists, could finally form, as the Koreans say, “like bamboo shoots after rain”; when young activists began challenging the U.S. dominance of the country; when the National Assembly blocked a new U.S. economic aid treaty because of the control it gave Washington over South Korean politics and economics. After seven years of relentless postwar tension with the Pyongyang communists, students in the south called openly for reunification of the two Koreas.
For the first time, too, the silenced, fearful families of leftists executed by the Rhee regime—before, during and after the war—called for an investigation of the summary killings. The National Assembly opened an inquiry.
In this atmosphere of new beginnings, Eun-yong spotted a newspaper article in the fall of 1960 saying a U.S. government office in Seoul was accepting claims for compensation related to U.S. actions in the Korean War. Eun-yong contacted several survivors from Chu Gok Ri and together they sent a letter to the Americans asking for an investigation of the No Gun Ri killings and compensation. The U.S. office replied by letter that they had missed a filing deadline.
Eun-yong wrote again, saying ordinary Koreans had been unaware of the claims process, and asking that their appeal be referred to Washington for reconsideration of the deadline. “This was an extremely atrocious incident for the victims and their families,” he wrote, “…a violation of the laws of war because it was a killing of unarmed civilians.” The letter asked: How could American soldiers have killed old people, children and women over three days when GIs, in fact, had approached the tunnel and could see they were not enemy troops?
Seventeen years as a policeman, on and off, seemed to entitle him to respect from the authorities, Eun-yong thought. But he never received a further response from U.S. officials, he said, and then the “spring” ended. Park Chung-hee, a major general who had graduated from the Japanese military academy, led a coup in May 1961 that threw out the civilian government and ushered in a generation of even greater right-wing repression and enforced silence. It would prove impossible to press the case of No Gun Ri.
“We couldn’t say publicly that the Americans committed such things during the war,” Eun-yong said. “The United States was such a powerful country. Speaking against the Americans was tantamount to calling yourself a communist.”
Chung Koo-hun, the tall, quiet student from Chu Gok Ri, a twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher in 1960, was one of those signing his name to the original claim. After the coup, he received anonymous telephone calls threatening his life. “The message was clear,” he said. Like the others, he now would have to deal in private with the anguish of No Gun Ri, an anguish that tore at him every time he looked into his little brother’s mutilated face.
* * *
The boy with the mask and the tall young man had waited in line together for days outside the Swedish Hospital in Pusan. It was March 31, 1956. Chung Koo-hun had heard that Swedish doctors in the port city were helping people badly hurt in the war. He brought fourteen-year-old Koo-hak the 100 miles from home, only to find sick and lame and disfigured Koreans thronging the hospital entrance, hoping for admission.
The boy’s wounds had been slow to heal, and he hadn’t regained his strength after the ordeal of the tunnels. He could be seen around Chu Gok Ri with cotton balls stuffed in the giant tear across the right side of his face. He often wore a mask. The naturally lively boy played with other children, but grew quieter, more withdrawn as time passed. In school, he stopped learning.
Outside the Pusan hospital, people simply waited, day and night, cooking, eating, sleeping in line. There was no shelter. But the line barely budged, and Koo-hun finally became desperate. He had to get home or lose his year-old job as a teacher in the Yongdong primary school.
Seeing a European woman in a white doctor’s gown, he rushed over to her with the boy with the hidden face. “I lied. I told her my brother’s terrible injury was inflicted by the bad North Korean communists, because I thought she’d get upset if I accused the Americans of doing this. I said I was a schoolteacher, I had no money and I had to get back to work.
“She lifted the mask on my brother’s face and took a look.”
The Swedish specialists kept Koo-hak for six months, operating on him several times, transplanting flesh from his hips, thighs and upper arms to the right side of his face. They put some substance and skin back, but it was still a partial face. Koo-hak remembered happy days at the seaside hospital, where he found he could be useful and appreciated. “I ran around the hospital, running errands for patients who couldn’t move very well,” he recalled. He ate well and was dressed in “relief clothing,” made from flour sacks.
Once back in Chu Gok Ri, however, the teenager resumed a peasant’s hard life in the Chung household, scaling mountains in search of firewood, climbing nearby slopes to pull weeds for mulch, carrying rice to the market—a life spent with an A-frame on his back, work that would have been hard even for a stronger boy. “All the time I was thinking, thinking,” Koo-hak said. How could a young man with a grotesque face make his way in the world?
For all the body’s weakness, the will grew stronger with age. One day, at about age twenty, he went to Koo-hun, told him he wanted to become a postman, and asked for his help. The elder brother’s response was brutal. “I probably thought I had to force him to face reality,” Koo-hun remembered. “I said, ‘Don’t overestimate yourself.… A crippled man like you can’t become a government official. With a face like yours, no one can pass as a normal man.’” The younger brother cried; the older brother regretted his harshness and couldn’t sleep that night.
Three days later, Koo-hak returned, in despair. He reminded his brother he was too weak to become a farmer, but had no idea what to do with his life. This time Koo-hun did. Their father’s fish shop had burned when U.S. planes destroyed Yongdong in 1950. The family had rebuilt it, but the old man languished in a depression after No Gun Ri, and the business with him. The schoolteacher now suggested that his little brother become a fish peddler, traveling to outlying villages with crates of salted pollack and mackerel and squid.
A peddler would need a bicycle, however, and a bicycle was an expensive luxury in an impoverished Korea. The brother who once carried a “dead” boy back from the grave knew he had no choice. He gave Koo-hak his own.
* * *
Beyond the Sonangdang Rock, beneath the fresh thatch of rebuilt roofs, Chu Gok Ri was a village of desolate souls in the 1950s, none more desolate than Chun Soon-pyo, father of little Choon-ja. The man the mutang declared to be “possessed” by his dead wife’s spirit became a mutang himself, not an unusual transformation in a land still attuned to age-old spiritism.
Believers felt that the unhappy spirit of Choon-ja’s mother, killed at No Gun Ri, was the father’s link to the nether world. He worked with a female mutang, the pair dancing, waving bamboo stalks, beating drums all night as they performed their gut ritual for villagers in the area. His “cures” of illnesses eventually earned this troubled man a living. He remarried and Choon-ja’s stepmother bore him six children.
As the eldest child in the house, the young teenager Choon-ja carried much of the workload, along with her grandmother. “We worked like men,” she recalled. Choon-ja collected firewood from the mountains, tended tobacco fields, sorted and dried leaves after the summer harvest. Even after going to seamstress school, she had to work full-time at home.
Choon-ja had wanted to go on to middle school, something she believed her mother would have liked. But her father and stepmother refused. Unable to play with other children or go to class, Choon-ja grew lonelier and sadder. But she had a secret. “I envied my friends so badly that I made a beautiful school uniform for myself—I had the skills—complete with a white collar. I kept that uniform in my closet, and I tried it on when I was alone. Sometimes I even wore it outside when my stepmother was away at the market.”
She also found comfort at the rebuilt Salvation Army church, a thatch-and-mud hall where congregants sat on straw mats for the song-filled evening services. Her parents didn’t like Choon-ja’s flirtation with Christianity, but she stubbornly had her way. “I could sing and meet friends there and trade gossip.” On Christmas Eve, she remembered, they would go around the village singing carols. She even dreamed of becoming a nun.
The girl saved by fate from the carnage at No Gun Ri had found escapes from reality and memory. But she believed one fantasy was real—her grandmother’s story of how Tae-sung perished in the tunnel, starving without his mother’s milk. Choon-ja still did not know the truth of who killed her beloved baby brother.
* * *
On Buddha’s birthday, a spring holiday, two years after No Gun Ri, a group of Im Ke Ri girls was climbing a mountain path, beneath pink clouds of cherry blossoms, to picnic high above the valley. A few village youths, meanwhile, were coming downhill. One spotted the tall girl in the group and shouted out, to the other boys’ laughter, “Here comes a one-eyed monster!”
Yang Hae-sook, fifteen at the time, recalled the pain of the moment. “I wanted to die on the spot. If there was a rat’s hole, I would have crawled in. Ever since I’ve been ashamed of myself.”
The Yangs couldn’t afford an artificial eye for their “Golden Girl” until she turned seventeen, when she was fitted with a plastic eyeball at a Taegu hospital. She was married three years later, in 1957. Marrying off such a handicapped daughter was a daunting task, but the Yangs found a poor family satisfied to have a son connected with a respectable, if humble, yangban clan. Ultimately the couple had four children, but it proved a hellish match for young Hae-sook.
Her husband was drunk every night and took to beating her, she said. He ridiculed and reviled her for her missing eye. He forced her from their bedroom; at times she had to sleep at neighbors’ homes. He threatened to gouge out her good eye, and attacked her once with a scythe. “For four years, I secretly took rice to the Buddhist temple and prayed for a happy marriage with my husband.”
Her family heard the rumors, and one day in 1958 her brother Hae-chan, a teenaged student, came to her house and accosted her husband. “Hae-chan and I made a pledge at No Gun Ri,” Hae-sook said. “That day we vowed to look after each other for the rest of our lives.” She remembered what he told her husband: “Why didn’t you make an issue of my sister’s eye in the first place? Didn’t we discuss it before the marriage?” He handed his brother-in-law a blank piece of paper. “Write down that you want a divorce. I’m going to live with my sister for the rest of my life.” As village elders listened, the husband meekly promised to treat Hae-sook better. But the marriage remained full of resentment and hate.
Hae-sook didn’t want a divorce, feeling it would disgrace her family. To escape, she traveled as a peddler in the 1960s and early 1970s, selling matches or ginseng a county or two away, often taking her newest baby along, finding shelter in the homes of kindly strangers. She remembered the nightmares from those lonely days—of a plane firing into the tunnel, or a cow consumed in flames. She kept a knife by her pillow, not to guard against her husband but as a defense—a Korean superstition—against the midnight demons of No Gun Ri.
* * *
They would talk about it on ancestors’ days, when families gathered in quiet reunions to honor their dead. But the survivors were publicly silent—not just the witnesses of No Gun Ri, but those who survived other U.S. strafings of refugee columns, the Rhee regime’s mass executions or other injustices of the early 1950s.
In Park Chung-hee’s police state, even talk among friends could be dangerous. Three times in the 1960s and 1970s, Yang Hae-chan was warned by the police to stop talking about No Gun Ri after he brought it up in unguarded moments among neighbors, usually after drinks, he said. If he hadn’t been prominent locally, he believed, he would have been jailed.
Yang Hae-chan, the small, tenacious “loyal son,” eventually became one of the best-known men in Yongdong County, a leader in agricultural development, a pioneer in replacing paddy land with a more lucrative crop, grapes. An admirer of the authoritarian President Park, Hae-chan was an activist in the “New Village” movement, the general’s program for improving rural life in South Korea. It was Hae-chan who in 1983 finally got the road paved between Im Ke Ri and Chu Gok Ri.
The Park regime encouraged industrialization and exports, setting the stage for a South Korean “miracle” of 8 percent–plus economic growth annually in the 1960s and 1970s. But growth was accompanied by widespread corruption, the concentration of power in a few business conglomerates and suppression of organized labor. Independent unions were discouraged and strikes banned.
Anti-communism more and more resembled a state religion. Thousands of political activists disappeared, hundreds of newspapers and periodicals were shut down. Red-lettered signs appeared in villages declaring, LET’S ACHIEVE REUNIFICATION BY ELIMINATING COMMUNISTS. The National Security Law promised seven years in prison for expressing support for “anti-state groups.”
Tens of thousands were stigmatized and put under surveillance. Chung Koo-hong, brother of the vanished “American-made leftist” Koo-il, was an example. Despite his college degree and good test scores, his superiors made clear that political suspicions at high levels kept the Chu Gok Ri native from advancing in his career with the railroad. The bosses were told to report on his activities. “When I moved into a new house, police detectives came to check on why I moved into their area.” And all his life Koo-hong would wonder whether his brother might be alive in North Korea.
The Americans were officially South Korea’s “saviors”; public criticism of the U.S. military was taboo. The United States became known as “Mee-Kook”—“Beautiful Country.” Park Chung-hee sent 45,000 South Korean troops to help the Americans fight the war in Vietnam in exchange for increased U.S. military and economic aid. Korea benefited, too, from the U.S. demand for war supplies.
The Park years ended in October 1979, when the general was assassinated by his own intelligence chief. A civilian administration took shape, promising popular elections, but soon other army generals stepped in and took command in Seoul. Then, in May 1980, the junta’s troops crushed a pro-democracy uprising in the southern city of Kwangju, killing hundreds of people. Many young Koreans blamed the United States, since the South Korean military still remained nominally under U.S. command. Protests against the U.S. presence sputtered on through the 1980s.
In 1986, a student activist tried a new tactic in the campaign, sending anti-American letters to 20,000 high school students. He was thrown in jail. Among the allegations in his notorious circular: that American soldiers massacred South Korean civilians during the 1950–1953 war.
* * *
The graying, stern-faced gentleman, small and slim in a well-worn business suit, shuttled among libraries in Taejon, called on historians in Seoul, packed his files with photocopies of pages from military histories, old newspapers, archival documents. A scholar recalled Chung Eun-yong the researcher of the early 1990s. “He was looking for anything, just anything. He was collecting data like a magpie,” said Yang Young-jo of the Korea Institute for Military History. The amateur investigator devoured everything in Korean, and then went on to Japanese, and even found U.S. Army material his son could read for him. Through it all, he had a special focus: American military operations in Yongdong County in July 1950.
Chung Eun-yong, the promising young man of Chu Gok Ri, had lived a “life of rags,” he would later say. He left the police force in 1960 to study for the national examination for a judgeship. He kept failing the notoriously difficult exam by narrow margins, ran low on money and had to look for work. A friend got him a job with the National Anti-Communist Coalition, but Eun-yong left after a few years, disgusted with the corruption of the government organization. As his Japanese bosses on the railroad found out long before, his quick mind and temper, and rigid ideas of right and wrong, made him a poor fit in some organizations.
Eun-yong joined with a partner in operating a small bottle-making plant in Taejon, but that failed in the early 1970s. After that, he took on odd jobs, sometimes helping friends with small construction companies, until retiring in the mid-1980s. Through it all, he said, “No Gun Ri never escaped my mind one single day.”
Sun-yong bore three sons and a daughter in the years after No Gun Ri, but for her, too, time in many ways stood still in July 1950. “She would get up at night and shake me, and ask if I heard something like the dead boy’s voice,” Eun-yong said. “She would wake up in the dead of night in a sweat, and screaming.”
His wife put on weight and developed serious arthritis over the years. Whenever it rained, her wounds from No Gun Ri would ache. The children grew up knowing their parents were haunted by black memories. “At night, I heard Mother having nightmares, shouting the names of my dead brother and sister,” said Koo-do, their eldest son. Once she was found praying, crying, on the snow-covered roof.
As Eun-yong traveled the Seoul-Taejon trains, sketched out maps of troop movements in July 1950, meticulously organized his volumes of material, his sons began to worry that his obsession with No Gun Ri would ruin his health. But the stubborn father paid them no heed. He was making progress. Poring over the histories and maps, he had come to a conclusion: His two children must have been killed by a unit of the 1st Cavalry Division.
* * *
The fish peddler’s face may have helped his business. Korean housewives, by custom, would not talk freely with strangers, but no husband would be jealous of Chung Koo-hak. Village women found it easy to deal with the young man who came around on the bicycle, with the full crate of fish and half a face.
Elder brother Koo-hun next talked their father into turning over his indebted dried-fish business to Koo-hak. The younger brother worked long hours to make it profitable. Late at night, he read books, educating himself. But Koo-hun knew his brother needed the helping hand and stability of a wife. The Chung family searched for a match, but even physically handicapped women recoiled from the offer. Finally they found a poor family with an eligible daughter in the next-door village of Ha Ga Ri. Persuasive emissaries overcame resistance, and twenty-year-old Chang Soon-yi was wed to twenty-six-year-old Chung Koo-hak in 1968. Her disapproving friends may have had second thoughts when they saw her travel off to a spa for something called a “honeymoon.” The young man had money.
“I was determined to become rich,” Koo-hak said. Soon-yi became the support underpinning that driving ambition, as well as the mother of two daughters and a son. The couple worked from before dawn to after dark, Koo-hak resting only on two holidays a year. By the 1980s, the store on Old Market Alley grew into the biggest fish business in Yongdong, a rebuilt town of quiet streets and colorful shops. Koo-hak became active in the community, with Soon-yi’s encouragement, joining the local soccer club and Rotary Club. An energetic, helpful member, he won friends and eventually was elected Rotary chairman. Arts festivals and other Yongdong events benefited from the fishmonger’s sponsorship and money.
Despite the success, Koo-hun still worried about his little brother, still called to check on his well-being. “When I see Koo-hak’s face today, my heart aches,” said the retired school vice principal, erect and vigorous in his late sixties. Koo-hak could never overcome the shame of his disfigurement, his dread of the eyes of others. “I never took my children to school because I was afraid their friends would see my face, embarrassing my children,” he said.
He also never overcame his shock at what happened at that trestle long ago. “Even if it’s war, you can’t just order your soldiers to shoot women and children,” he said. “The Americans may not have thought we were human beings, because we were living in such destitute places, like animals.”
Koo-hak, like other survivors, said he believed South Koreans finally climbed out of that destitution thanks, in part, to sacrifices made by young American soldiers during the war. “But the fact they fought to save us shouldn’t stop us from telling the truth about what really happened at No Gun Ri. It was a mass killing of innocent civilians of an allied country.”
At times the brothers wondered what could have been. In Chung Koo-hak’s spacious, modern apartment in Yongdong, one vision of that life hung over the sofa, in vivid oils, a portrait that showed the successful businessman in his red Rotary blazer, in a dignified stance, with a face that is handsome, smiling and whole.
* * *
On a spring day in the early 1970s, Yang Hae-sook walked along the Pusan beach with her shoes in her hand. One cannot enter the afterlife with shoes on.
The half-blind “Golden Girl,” now a mother of four, had decided to drown herself in the waters of the Korea Strait. “I was tired of my life. It was too much.” She had come to Pusan to peddle ginseng, and was staying at the home of an old woman she knew. She left her money and possessions there, and went to Kamchon Beach to throw herself into the sea. But she found too many people there, and so she waited for darkness. In the evening, the fishermen came home, and children ran down to the shore to welcome their fathers. Hae-sook’s mind turned back home. “I thought of my children, and my only eye blurred with tears,” she said. “I slowly changed my mind. I decided to live, and to work hard, to feed my children and give them a better life than I had.” She went back to the old woman’s. They cried together.
Hard work—selling small things, working in other people’s fields—helped one forget, she found. As with Chung Koo-hak, her embarrassment over her artificial eye denied her some of life’s pleasures. She didn’t attend her children’s graduations. When it came time to arrange her elder daughter’s marriage, she sent her sister-in-law in her place. But Hae-sook devoted herself to her children. Her husband had refused to enroll the elder daughter in high school; instead she was sent to work in a sweatshop in Seoul. Hae-sook, whose own father kept her out of school, took an overnight train and hunted the daughter down in the metropolis, brought her home and put her in school. “She was always at the top of her class,” she said.
Her husband died in 1996. “He left me nothing.” Four years later, sixty-two-year-old Yang Hae-sook, who taught herself to write, put down some reflections.
“I’ve lived my life in tears,” she wrote. “Since the No Gun Ri incident, I’ve never been able to hold up my face with pride.… Who can I talk to about these feelings of mine?” Keeping her han to herself, she wrote, had been “a huge cold stone on my heart.” Relatively few Koreans, even in the 1990s, received professional help for such mental disorders as post-traumatic stress. One doctor advised Hae-sook to sing to herself when the inner darkness descended. She sang constantly.
* * *
“Sometimes living through one day was like living through 1,000 years,” Chun Choon-ja said. “But, looking back, I realize a person’s life is like the morning mist. It comes and goes so quickly.”
Choon-ja, motherless child, lived many long days in her life. When she was married, at twenty-two, her stepmother filled her bridal quilts with dried weeds, and the humiliated Choon-ja had to secretly pilfer the traditional cotton filling from her in-laws’ bedding. When her drunken husband, years later, discovered she was going to a Christian church, he flung her Bible into the fireplace. When he later quit his government job and ran for political office, he threw away most of their money on a losing election campaign.
But Choon-ja’s longest day was March 3, 1983, when she got a telephone call telling her that her son, one of four children, had died in an industrial accident. “It was like the earth caving in under my feet.”
She took in her son’s one-year-old boy—“the same age as my dead brother when he died”—to rear at her home in Pusan. She had separated and then reunited with her husband, and had worked over the years in a factory, as a noodle vendor and at other jobs, losing touch with her old Chu Gok Ri neighbors. It wasn’t until that grandson was in high school and she renewed contacts with her home village that Choon-ja finally learned the truth about her brother Tae-sung’s death a half-century earlier. An unthinking villager, a No Gun Ri survivor, described to her the madhouse scene in which her father drowned the screaming baby beneath the trestle.
“It felt like a knife in my heart,” she said. Tae-sung had not perished of starvation; her father had killed his own “Great Success,” amid the terror of the American gunfire. The old man was dead now, but she finally understood his troubled mind. Her own was still more troubled. “I can’t go to sleep very well,” Choon-ja said. “The baby comes back to me at night … The souls of the dead won’t rest until the full truth is known.”
* * *
In a sunny upstairs apartment in a crowded Taejon neighborhood, above a garden of roses, persimmon and fig, Chung Eun-yong read and reread the books and documents, collated and compared the data, considered and reconsidered what he had learned from villagers, and then began to write.
“In the beginning, it was purely personal. I wrote about No Gun Ri to soothe myself,” he said of those days in the early 1990s. “When I talked about it, few people seemed interested, and they said it was useless to talk about such things. It involves the Americans, they reminded me.”
But beyond the narrow little garden of the aging couple, South Korea was changing. Through the mid-1980s, in scenes televised worldwide, pro-democracy and anti-American protests rocked Seoul and other cities, and hundreds were arrested. Over time the public pressure—and the U.S. shift toward democratic reform in the Philippines and elsewhere in east Asia—led the military regime to open up South Korean politics.
Above the 38th Parallel, communist North Korea remained a rigidly one-party, authoritarian state through the decades, even after Kim Il Sung died in 1994, after forty-eight years in power, and his son, Kim Jong Il, took charge. Economists believed that into the 1970s the northerners, under a Soviet-style centrally planned economy, were on average better off than South Koreans. But the weaknesses of Stalinist economics, with its often wasteful “megaprojects” and lack of individual incentives, eventually stultified North Korean growth. By the 1990s, food shortages were leaving millions of North Korean children malnourished; many died.
The South Korean economy, meanwhile, rapidly expanded. A country whose number three export item in the early 1960s was wigs made of human hair developed into a global export power, selling automobiles and computer chips in the United States and elsewhere. It also progressed politically. In 1987, under growing public pressure, the military leadership agreed to a popular presidential election under a new constitution that also guaranteed such rights as freedom of the press. Former general Roh Tae-woo, succeeding his military partner Chun Doo-hwan, won the election of December 16, 1987, because the opposition vote was divided between two major civilian candidates. But the ex-general, as president, did not try to stall the momentum toward full democracy, and in 1992 one of those opposition candidates, Kim Young-sam, was elected as the first civilian president in decades.
In Taejon, a man nearing seventy saw a window reopening after thirty-two years, a chance again to demand a public accounting for the deaths of his two children and of many others. By now Eun-yong’s eldest surviving son was at his side. “I often wanted to tell my father to forget about No Gun Ri,” said Chung Koo-do, who inherited the unsmiling intensity of the ex-policeman from Chu Gok Ri. “But as I grew older and had my own family, my own children, I could understand my father. I knew nobody else would do it for us.”
Eun-yong’s writing had taken shape as a book, about his memories of the war with No Gun Ri at the center. When Koo-do, who worked for the public electric utility, came home in the evenings, he would sometimes pick up the handwritten pages. He said tears often welled up as he read. “I began helping my father with his manuscript, converting his old-fashioned style into today’s language.” Sometimes father and son would work until three or four in the morning.
Friends and relatives warned Koo-do that delving into the past might jeopardize his job with the power company. Most South Koreans simply viewed such subjects as untouchable. “I couldn’t find any scholar studying these incidents,” Eun-yong said, “and I felt that our people were cowardly when it comes to speaking out about the Americans.”
The election of Kim Young-sam was the signal Eun-yong needed to take his manuscript to publishers. One house after another, about ten in all, turned him down, telling him it was too controversial; it would be the first book ever published in South Korea accusing U.S. troops of such civilian killings. A pastor’s wife who was a novelist recommended some trimming and encouraged Eun-yong, but still he could find no one willing to issue the book. Finally, a friend of Koo-do’s led them to an obscure young publisher who agreed to publish it, but who labeled it a “novel based on a true story.”
Do You Know Our Agony? was published in April 1994. “I’m over seventy now,” Eun-yong said in the foreword. “I began writing this book because if I don’t publicize this incident to the world, I believe it will be buried in history forever.… We want to remain friends with the United States. We wish the United States will take conscientious and sincere steps on the No Gun Ri incident to ease the pain in our hearts.”
After a few thousand copies were printed—many were bought by Eun-yong himself—the book went out of print. But it won some attention. Thanks to Koo-do’s acquaintanceship with a reporter for South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, a review of Do You Know Our Agony? ran on that news wire. Other Korean journalists then called, and several newspaper and magazine articles followed. The articles, in turn, brought other No Gun Ri survivors to Chung Eun-yong. For Chun Choon-ja, in Pusan, it was encouraging to see what happened at No Gun Ri in print. “One of the greatest heartaches in my life was that I couldn’t talk about it and what it did to me.”
Eun-yong began hearing new accounts, through others’ eyes, of what happened in July 1950. “I realized that the scope of the No Gun Ri incident was much greater than I had thought.… We needed to get organized and send petitions and ask for a formal investigation.”
The ex-policeman formed a five-man survivors committee that included Yang Hae-chan, who had been elected to the Yongdong County Council, and Chung Koo-hun, the educator. In early July 1994, they drafted their first petition to “His Excellency Bill Clinton,” a letter that told of “the killing of innocent noncombatants by your country’s soldiers,” and asked the U.S. president to “understand our pain and take measures, such as an apology and compensation, to console both the dead and the survivors.”
Another committee member was Chu Gok Ri farmer Chung Koo-ho, the boy who was saved by his dying mother, the peasant woman praying to Buddha, in the tunnel at No Gun Ri. He had once sought to escape his haunting memories by retreating to a solitary mountain to raise silkworms. This convert to Christianity spent fifteen years there. He said he read the Bible thirty times.
“It was like David and Goliath,” Koo-ho said of the appeal to the U.S. leadership. “Not many people would understand how overwhelmed we felt when poor rural people from a small country had to stand up against the world’s most powerful country.”
On July 5, 1994, Koo-ho, Eun-yong and the three other committee members traveled to Seoul to present their petition at the U.S. Embassy. A few hundred yards from the fortresslike building on broad, busy Sejong Boulevard, Korean plainclothes policemen intercepted the men and told them they could get no closer without an appointment. As the five debated what to do, they were approached by journalists they had alerted to their petition. The newsmen raised their cameras, the policemen retreated and the five petitioners were allowed into the embassy. There a woman came to the doorstep, took the document and walked away, without a word to the villagers.
They felt humiliated. “She didn’t even ask us to sit down or have a drink,” said Eun-yong. “On our way back home, we didn’t talk,” Yang Hae-chan recalled. “We were helpless, but I’m sure each of us was angry at what we saw as the arrogance of the big country, America.”
They received no response, but grew still more determined to press their case. Over the next three years, the survivors said, they sent three more petitions to President Clinton, and nine to other American and South Korean leaders. Only one drew a reply, a letter addressed to President Kim that the South Korean Defense Ministry passed on to the U.S. military command in Seoul.
The local commander of the U.S. Armed Forces Claims Service, the office charged with handling compensation cases, responded to that petition. “It appears that the incident giving rise to your claims arose directly from a combat activity of the Armed Forces. The United States is not legally liable for such claims resulting from an act of the Armed Forces of the United States in combat,” wrote Maj. John G. Warthen. His letter, dated October 28, 1994, did not say the U.S. military had conducted any investigation of the claim.
Chung Eun-yong wrote back, saying U.S. troops at No Gun Ri were not engaged in combat when they killed the refugees, and the killings constituted a war crime. Six weeks later, Warthen replied, referring him to the first letter and writing, “This is our final and conclusive response to this matter.” Said Eun-yong, “My heart collapsed when they told me that it was their last response.”
Among the unacknowledged letters, the survivors group said, were those addressed to Vice President Al Gore, in his role as U.S. Senate president; Newt Gingrich, the U.S. House speaker; the U.S. ambassador in Seoul, James T. Laney; and leaders of South Korea’s new civilian government. “We thought our own government should take the lead and listen to eyewitness accounts. We thought our government would comfort us that way,” Eun-yong said. “But nobody came. It was a severe letdown for us.”
* * *
In the summer of 1997, the villagers heard it was possible to seek compensation for damages under the Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and South Korean governments, the legal framework for the U.S. military presence in South Korea. Thirty of them traveled together to Chongju, 35 miles from Yongdong, to submit claims at a district prosecutor’s office. But an official there refused to give them claim forms, telling them it was pointless. As they stood outside, angry and dejected, one villager telephoned a reporter, an acquaintance of his, at a local television station. He showed up with an empty camera; his editors were uneasy with the story, he told them. But the sight of the camera persuaded the bureaucrat to let the villagers file their claims.
“We asked for compensation because such a gesture would be a sure sign that the United States was truly apologetic,” Eun-yong said. “We don’t need empty words for an apology. Compensation would tell us they mean what they say.” The thirty survivors listed 120 relatives as No Gun Ri victims; they noted only their own families’ dead on the claim forms. The list from Im Ke Ri included the poignant entry “Cho (an infant boy born and killed in the tunnel).”
At the time, in 1950, the North Korean journalist Chun Wook had written of 400 dead; Eun-yong’s son discovered that report on microfilm at the National Assembly Library. No Gun Ri villager Kim Myong-june, born after the killings, said he remembered older villagers talking about 300 bodies at the scene. The survivors’ own list of dead and missing would eventually, after the claims were filed in 1997, surpass 200 names, including almost 50 babies and small children.
For many reasons, fixing a precise death toll for No Gun Ri would prove impossible. People from other villages had mixed into the refugee column; families were wiped out, leaving no one to report their deaths; some babies had not been registered officially; surviving relatives had scattered across the country and were not in touch with the petitioner group or had later died. “Whole families were killed.… Those families are still registered to be alive today, even though some would be well over one hundred years old,” said Chung Koo-ho. The survivors group—people who were there and saw the aftermath—eventually settled on an estimated death toll of “up to four hundred.”
In yet another letter addressed to Bill Clinton, two weeks after filing the compensation claims on August 25, 1997, the villagers wrote of No Gun Ri: “It was an atrocity against innocent Korean refugees, committed by armed U.S. troops.… About 400 souls roam around high above the killing field.… The victims’ families are still suffering today from this nightmare of a tragedy. Please conduct a thorough investigation.… We want the truth, justice, and due respect for our basic human rights.”
As with the compensation committee in Chongju, the claimants told the U.S. president they suspected troops of the 1st Cavalry Division were responsible for killing the refugees at No Gun Ri.
Six weeks after the compensation claims were submitted, the U.S. military responded. Kelly B. White, a lawyer with the Armed Forces Claims Service in Seoul, wrote to the Chongju District Compensation Committee saying the claims must be denied for several reasons.
“First, there is no evidence to support the claims nor is there any evidence to show that the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division was in the area where the incident allegedly occurred. Additionally, it appears that the alleged incident giving rise to the claims arose directly from combat activities of the armed forces,” White wrote. The letter contended that any casualties during that period would have been combat-related, and combat-related incidents were not legally eligible for compensation. Finally, it said, the Status of Forces Agreement required filing of such claims within three years after the incident.
After years of petitions and claims, neither the U.S. military, the U.S. Embassy, the White House, the South Korean government nor anyone else in authority showed any interest in investigating the villagers’ accounts of a massacre that midsummer week in 1950. The survivors, for their part, did not have the capacity to conduct their own broader investigation, by researching the vast declassified archive of U.S. military documents in Washington or by trying to find American witnesses.
They did not even have a lawyer, just the elderly, single-minded ex–law student Chung Eun-yong, and they had been ignored or overlooked by the U.S. news media, the newspapers, television networks and news agencies whose reports often prompted Washington officials to take action.
This little-noted campaign by unknown Korean villagers came down to points of law. On December 3, 1997, they got their notification from the Chongju District Compensation Committee. It had ruled against them. It acknowledged that people were killed at No Gun Ri, but said there was no evidence of U.S. involvement—even though dozens of survivors attested to it. The claimants then appealed to a national compensation committee, and on April 28, 1998, that body rejected their claims, noting the statute of limitations’ three-year deadline had expired forty-five years earlier.
In Chu Gok Ri, Im Ke Ri and elsewhere among the survivors, a feeling of helplessness set in once more. At age seventy-five, even Chung Eun-yong, for the first time, considered giving up. “Friends were sympathetic,” he said, “but they all reminded me that I am nothing but a little man and I can’t fight a giant like the U.S. government. They said it was like a praying mantis trying to stop the rolling wheel of an oxcart.”
For decades every late July, in the evening quiet of individual homes, villagers stood before ceremonial offerings of food to honor their loved ones killed at No Gun Ri. Confucian tradition dictates such family anniversary memorials. In Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri, the families bowed, the lamps stayed lighted late, all on the same nights.
In 1998, the survivors for the first time gathered at the trestle itself for a memorial ceremony. Chun Choon-ja, up from Pusan, was suddenly frightened once more, like the ten-year-old who lost sight of her grandfather that day in the frenzy of fire from American foxholes. She looked around at the hillsides, now forested where they weren’t before. “I still felt as though American soldiers were in the hills, but I couldn’t see them because of the woods.”
Choon-ja tried to separate out feelings of hate and forgiveness. She hated what they did to her mother, grandfather and others at No Gun Ri, but she tried not to hate the soldiers, she said. “They’re old now. I know they came here under orders from their government, far away from home. They had to do what they were ordered to do. It’s the government that must be blamed, and the high-ranking people and the kind of war they chose to fight.”
* * *
The herons still flew in, springtime dabs of white, but there were fewer these days—too many chemicals in the soil, villagers thought, and too few rice paddies. Black grapes, for wine and table, had spread across the valleys of Yongdong. The county had more vineyards, 6,000 acres, than any other in South Korea. Where villagers a half-century earlier bent over rice paddy rows, their off-spring now reached up to tend vines.
The countryside around the little valley had been transformed. Park Chung-hee, strongman president of the 1960s and 1970s, had decreed that South Korea’s stripped slopes be made green again, and they were reforested. He discouraged thatched roofs, the fire hazard atop every peasant’s hut, and blue ceramic or composite tiles now roofed the homes, more substantial houses these days, in Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri. Many rural Koreans still remembered Park as their greatest friend.
Across the valley between Yongdong and Hwanggan marched towering concrete pylons, soon to carry an elevated bullet train from Seoul to southern points. The link would turn the old Japanese main line into a sidetrack, just as expressways had made a backroad of the highway, the old road on which Eun-yong took his bride home to Chu Gok Ri, on which the refugees walked into the guns of the Americans.
Farther south, along the Naktong, the expressways had cut off the town of Samni-dong from the apple orchard, the riverside rise where Art Hunter screamed “Garryowen!” as he got ready to die. Northeast of Waegwan, where another freeway sliced through a maze of valleys, the drivers of speeding Hyundais and Daewoos couldn’t know that this was where a barefoot Mel Chandler led a trapped band of GIs through enemy fire to American lines. No plaques marked such spots; more than 700 monuments dotted the South Korean landscape in remembrance of the 1950–1953 war, but they could never tell the story. No marker told where James Hodges died alone, or where Brumagen and Dean were killed while Ralph Bernotas watched, or where countless other ghosts were born to live with old soldiers until the hour of their own deaths.
Even where the monuments were placed, they could bear false witness. Beside the Naktong at Waegwan, a plaque at the rebuilt bridge stated that General Gay of the 1st Cavalry Division ordered the bridge blown up on August 3, 1950, to “deter infiltrating enemy.” It didn’t note that hundreds of refugees were blown up with it.
At a small concrete railroad trestle 30 miles to the north, nothing would have caused a passerby to stop and ponder what happened there. Only a handful of Koreans and Americans knew. Whenever Chun Choon-ja, one of them, had to take the train to Seoul, she closed her eyes after it pulled out of Hwanggan and didn’t open them again until it had crossed the bridge at No Gun Ri.
Up the road from the trestle, a tall, sturdy woman in a sunbonnet, her face tanned and lined, now trimmed the shoots and leaves in her own small vineyard, a patch of land not far from the 4.4 acres of her devoted younger brother, the local grape-grower Yang Hae-chan. Often, she sang to herself as she worked.
“I sometimes think I hear the whispers of the ghosts,” Yang Hae-sook said. “Not human voices, but they seem to talk in the wind. It used to terrify me, but not any longer. The hills and tunnel look empty, but in fact they’re filled with the spirits of the dead.”
Above, on the hill across the tracks, the grave of Chung Koo-ho’s mother, the woman who prayed to Buddha as she shielded her children, looked out toward Chu Gok Ri. Each morning her son opened his window in the sleepy village and looked up to see her there. Downhill, among the chattering magpies, another mound rose on the grassy slope, where the schoolteacher Chung Koo-ok, the pride of Chu Gok Ri, lay in her maiden’s grave. It bore no marker; Korean custom allows none for the unmarried dead. But everyone knew whose bones rested there.
* * *
In Seoul, on a clear day, tourists in the 1990s could see all the way to North Korea from atop a sixty-three-story skyscraper. A half-century on, the city that was reduced to ash and rubble by the guns and bombs of 1950–1951 had lifted itself up into gleaming towers of glass and steel, had spread out into a complex of ten million people, Asia’s second-largest city, crisscrossed by superhighways and grand boulevards jammed with Korean-made automobiles, filled with busy people rushing to the high-rise offices of global conglomerates and the aisles of stylish shopping malls. Two dozen bridges now spanned the broad Han, linking the halves of a metropolis. Below the teeming streets, a world-class subway system carried four million passengers a day, keeping the economic engine turning. And in the heart of it all, the Eighth Army’s headquarters, hub of a 37,000-member U.S. military force, sprawled over the riverside Yongsan district, a conspicuous testament to something that had not changed, the confrontation with the north. The first battlefront of the Cold War was the last as well, under a hair-trigger armistice now forty-five years old.
On a Saturday in April 1998, a young journalist rode that subway’s Orange Line to work. He was a child of the new South Korea—born thirty-six years earlier and, like many riding with him, a migrant from a farming village who had found a good job in the great city.
He remembered the walls of his village, when he was a boy, painted with red letters calling for the extermination of communists. On his college campus in the 1980s, he saw the clashes of police with anti-American students. He himself served his mandatory two years in the military, as a Korean soldier assigned to a U.S. Army division. He ended up working for a U.S. news organization. He had felt both the overbearing presence of the Americans and the welcome security.
That Saturday was a quiet news day; the political and economic headlines generated by a new president, Kim Dae-jung, had entered a lull. When the young man arrived at his office, he realized it was a good day for a journalist to clean off his desk.
Sorting through stacks of paper, he turned up an old article he once set aside, an intriguing piece from a small Seoul magazine, a story that had gotten little attention. A photograph showed a few graying men standing stiffly outside the U.S. Embassy. A caption said they were petitioning for redress for a “massacre” committed by U.S. troops during the war.
The claim was jarring; it didn’t fit the script of history. The books didn’t speak of such things. But the reporter remembered his grandparents did, speaking not only of brutality by the communists, but by their own southern soldiers and police, and by American GIs. His grandmother talked of restless souls in the hills and valleys all around, and asked the boy if he saw the flickering lights, the hon bul.
He dialed up one of the petitioners. An old man picked up the phone in Taejon. The journalist explained he was with an American news agency and wanted to know more.
There was a long pause at the other end of the line, as the old man cleared his throat. It had been forty-eight years. The father had kept faith with the son. “I always believed someone would listen to my story,” Chung Eun-yong finally said.
“Where do you want to begin?”