No Gun Ri
Exploring reactions to the Korean War tragedy |
By Jason Ma

Although Nam Tai Cho, president of the Korean Veterans Association in Los Angeles, was only 8 years old when the Korean War broke out, the memories he has are still fresh. “I can still feel it on my skin,” Cho, 57, said in Korean.

And while he was not in No Gun Ri from July 26 - 29, 1950 when hundreds of fleeing civilians were reportedly killed by U.S. soldiers, he remembers all too well the chaos and carnage ravaging Korea that he said people all over the country were experiencing.

Indeed, Cho remembers seeing so many people die during the Korean War that he said the reports of the killings at No Gun Ri did not surprise him. “People were dying everywhere,” he said. “Over 35,000 Americans died too.”

Cho emphasized that he doesn’t want the long history of good relations between the United States and South Korea jeopardized by the investigation into what happened in the South Korean village, where survivors say U.S. soldiers killed some 400 civilians. So far, about a dozen U.S. soldiers corroborated the villagers’ accounts.

However, the fact that Korean Americans live in the country that allegedly perpetrated the killings adds a twist to the nature of the reactions that the testimonies from Koreans have produced. Moreover, the almost fifty year lag in between the occurrence of the events and the breaking of the news in September has produced generational cleavages in the reactions of Korean Americans.

Charles Kim, the executive director of the Los Angeles-based Korean American Coalition, said beside the differences in opinions between Koreans and Korean Americans like Cho, there have been three types of responses within the Korean American community -- largely based on age.

The first group consists of older people who lived through the war and experienced first hand all the suffering it caused. They tend to blame North Korea for inciting the shootings at No Gun Ri and prefer to put the issue behind them without incident, he said.

The second group is made up of people who were born and raised in Korea, immigrated to the U.S. as adults and are now in their thirties to forties. They generally want to find out more facts but do not want the killings to threaten the close U.S.-Korea relationship.

And the third group consists of U.S.-born and U.S.-raised Korean Americans, mostly in their teens to twenties. According to Kim, this last group takes a more “progressive” perspective by calling for an investigation and the prosecution of anyone found guilty of war crimes. However, he admits that overall he has not seen much activity from that segment of the community, attributing it to their greater removal from the country of their parents.

“They’re indifferent,” he said. “They were born here; they feel strongly they are Americans. That’s a fact of life.”

But older Koreans and Korean Americans, traumatized by the war, are quick to point out the context in which the killings at No Gun Ri took place.

“IT WAS VERY TENUOUS.”

Cho said his and his peers’ muted opinions on No Gun Ri are rooted in a deep empathy for the losses U.S. forces were suffering at the time and an understanding of the military situation.

By late July 1950, North Korean forces had already penetrated deep into South Korea. General Douglas MacArthur had not made his vaunted Inchon Landing, which turned the tide of the war, and the small number of U.S. forces in Korea had yet to be reinforced.

Indeed, only months before, then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson had announced that the U.S. sphere of interest in East Asia included Japan and the Philippines -- leaving the Korean Peninsula explicitly outside of it. As a result, the U.S. forces, which had been in Korea since the end of World War II to disarm the occupying Japanese troops, began leaving.

When the North made its surprise attack on June 25, 1950, whatever was left of the U.S. forces was easily overrun along with the South Korean military. By the next month, the United States and South Korea had retreated 100 miles southeast of the capital Seoul to the province of Chungchongbuk-do, where the village of No Gun Ri lay.

The situation at the time was dire, Cho said. The U.S. and South Korean troops were holding out in the southeastern corner of the country around the port city of Pusan. On July 29, it deteriorated to the point that the army leadership issued “stand or die” orders and established the “Pusan Perimeter” as a last line of defense.

At No Gun Ri, near the edge of what would become the perimeter, U.S. troops, had heard rumors that North Korean spies and saboteurs were infiltrating the throngs of fleeing civilians, pretending to look like farmers. Too afraid to take any chances and already desperate to hold the line, the troops decided to kill all those fleeing.

“It was a war situation,” Cho explained. “Of course there were some mistakes. The U.S. military sacrificed too. At first a lot of U.S. soldiers died. ... [The North Koreans] tried to occupy the whole peninsula. [No Gun Ri] was a very important area. It was very tenuous.”

Cho suggested that North Korean spies in No Gun Ri may have encouraged the survivors to speak out and damage the relations between the United and South Korea.

GENERATION GAP

Opinions like his are common among the older generation of Korean Americans, Cho said, but the younger generation of Koreans and Korean Americans, more idealistic in their views of the world, tend to blame the U.S. military.

“The first generation thinks it’s natural. There was nothing that could be done,” Cho explained. “Young people, when they hear about human life, they feel for the casualties. They look at things too simply. But they don’t understand how bad the North Koreans bastards were.”

But raised in the era after the post-civil rights movement, the second generation of Korean Americans often sees the issue as one of human rights and social justice that needs to be addressed accordingly.

Some Korean American students, in fact, are taking a pro-active role in addressing what happened at No Gun Ri, said John Kim, executive director of the Korean Community Center of the East Bay. For example, an e-mail letter writing campaign started by students asks lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to request a thorough investigation into the accounts of survivors and those of U.S. troops who were there.

Even within the younger generation of Korean Americans, opinions vary, said Kim, 24. “There are some who might not concern themselves with it,” he said, but added that some of his peers were as angry as he was upon hearing the news.

Kim also saw the importance of where and when he lived. Like Kim, who grew up in Orange County, most U.S.-raised Korean Americans lived without the strident anti-communist sentiment that the older generation experienced in South Korea following the fratricidal war.

“The issues have been pushed aside for a long time in Korea,” said Kim. “My concern is whether or not we’re giving fair and adequate consideration.”

Cho’s pre-immigration life is a telling contrast to that of the typical second generation Korean American. As a soldier in the Korean Army, he rose to the rank of major before retiring. During his career, he served in the Vietnam War from 1968 to 1969, as part of a deployment of Korean forces aiding U.S. troops in their fight against communists there. He also patrolled the heavily armed Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea. (The two countries, who have not signed a peace treaty, are still technically at war. Hence, the term “DMZ” is used rather than “border.”)

In 1968, Cho even hunted down North Korean commandos who had sneaked into the South in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the then-South Korean President Park Chung Hee.

Not surprisingly, Kim says he can understand why older Korean Americans, who see the United States as a rescuer and now call it home, have a more muted reaction to the news of killings at No Gun Ri.

Nevertheless, Kim said: “There could be merit to both sides. But in an incident where U.S. soldiers came forward, at the very least there should be an investigation.”

FACE TO FACE

The generational gap aside, Korean Americans confronted another divide, this time a cultural one, when they met with the Korean survivors last month. The older Korean Americans preferred to put the past behind them and place the blame solely on North Korea, while the survivors were not willing to absolve the U.S. completely of its actions.

Both Koreans and Korean Americans met in Los Angeles on Nov. 15, where No Gun Ri survivors testified about their experiences. The visit was part of a national tour arranged by the U.S. National Council of Churches and its South Korean counterpart.

During the conference, Kum Cho-ja, 60, gestured to her side and described the feeling of a bullet that exploded through her abdomen, leaving her scarred for life. Chung Eun-yong, 77, whose two young sons were killed in the attack, explained that most of the victims were women and children. Speaking in Korean, they pointed to a color drawing and described how soldiers fired upon them huddling beneath a railroad bridge.

As distressing as their accounts were, Cho said he was divided about their visit to the United States, torn between a desire to know the truth of what happened on that July day in 1950 and his loyalties to the country he has called home for 24 years.

Furthermore, Cho insisted North Korea was using stories about No Gun Ri for propaganda, pointing to articles he had obtained from the North Korean newspaper, Nodong Shinmun. He blasted the newspaper for reporting that the United States was at fault for the killings. “I thought it was all a bunch of lies. What’s the evidence?”

But in their message to Korean Americans, the survivors said that they are not trying to punish the American military. After having met with veterans in Cleveland and military officials in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Army has promised a thorough investigation, they said. If the military concludes their story is accurate, they said they will seek an apology and, perhaps, compensation.

“[The survivors] prefer to have a good relationship and appreciate what the U.S. soldiers and government have done to South Korea,” said Dr. Young Seok Suh, who acted as an interpreter for the survivors. “But they think what happened at No Gun Ri and American democracy are two different things. ... In this instance, innocent people were killed by the Army, so they want to find the facts.”

But during the meeting in Los Angeles, Cho even implored survivors not to use the Korean equivalent of the word “massacre,” saying it had too many bad connotations. Instead, he asked them to call it an “incident.” They flatly refused, he said.

“I am very sad, but all of the responsibility is on North Korea,” said Cho. “American South Koreans don’t want to damage the relationship. It is important -- our friendship.”

Oh Sungkwon, 22, is disappointed that Korean Americans, in general, haven’t reacted more disapprovingly. “Unfortunately, they don’t have such a strong unity as [native] Koreans,” he said.

Oh was an exchange student from Korea’s Yonsei University studying English at the University of Iowa when he first heard the news of the killings at No Gun Ri.

“The war situation cannot cover everything. It’s too immoral. They shot people without [weapons],” said Oh, who added that his parents and the other Korean exchange studying in Iowa with him felt the same way.

Oh also suspected that by limiting coverage, the American media “minimized the effect of No Gun Ri” to avoid the shame of taking responsibility for it. “I think that Koreans who live in the States didn’t feel the same way we did, and most of them even had no interest in No Gun Ri,” Oh said.

Oh did not share Cho’s empathy for the U.S. troops and dismissed arguments that they were afraid North Korean spies and saboteurs were hidden among the fleeing refugees. “Surely the U.S. should have had another way to recognize North Koreans. Even if there were some spies, it was 400 people’s lives to kill one spy,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.