On August 11, 1945, as World War II drew toward a close, two U.S. Army planning officers in Washington chose an invisible line across Korea, the 38th Parallel, for dividing the Japanese colony into Soviet and American zones, north and south. Five years later, on June 25, 1950, Korean troops from the north invaded the south to try to reunify the nation. They were led by communists. The resulting war, which ended in 1953 in stalemate, was the first great clash of arms of the Cold War.
Within days of the invasion, the United States rushed American troops from police duty in Japan to fight alongside its South Korean ally. The Americans who were shipped across the Sea of Japan were mostly green, teenaged recruits, with insufficient combat training, led in many cases by inexperienced officers in units that were understrength and poorly equipped. They reeled before the North Korean attack, in weeks of desperate retreat, until finally holding a last-ditch defense line. Hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians fled south with them. It was a bleak, humiliating chapter in U.S. military history, soon forgotten by the American people.
Almost a half century later, on September 29, 1999, the forgotten chapter burst into newspaper headlines worldwide, with a story of buried history, of unforgiven acts from that long-ago war, at a place called No Gun Ri. The Associated Press reported that a dozen graying ex-soldiers, young GIs of 1950, had confirmed what South Korean villagers claimed: U.S. forces in July 1950 killed large numbers of civilian refugees—up to 400, the Koreans said, mostly women, children and old men—under and around a railroad trestle at the hamlet of No Gun Ri. The AP also published declassified military documents showing that U.S. commanders had issued standing orders to shoot civilians rather than risk infiltration by disguised enemy soldiers.
The highest levels of the U.S. and South Korean governments immediately ordered investigations, military inquiries that then dragged on for many months, ending in weeks of conflict between American and Korean investigators. In its final report in January 2001, the U.S. Army, after years of dismissing the villagers’ story, affirmed the AP’s finding that American troops killed the refugees. But it assigned no blame. Instead, it said, “What befell civilians in the vicinity of No Gun Ri in late July 1950 was a tragic and deeply regrettable accompaniment to a war.”
Here is the story of No Gun Ri and that war, of what accompanied it, preceded it, and followed it, as seen through the eyes of the only people who could really know—Korean villagers and American soldiers who were there.