[KS] Nogun-ri: Korean My Lai

[KAHS]

I just got this off the "Friends Network".

Looks like there are still those who think that just because Bruce Cumings
says something means it's automatically leftist, and therefore suspect--Cold
War dinosaurs, I would say.
--Matthew Benuska



----------
From: Ted Barker <tbarker at kwp.org>
To: Dave Hughes <dave at oldcolo.com>
Subject: Re: [fwd]: Korean My Lai
Date: 1999 /Oct/14/5:13 PM


Dave et al,


The tonality of the article made me wonder about his politics, immediately.
So similar to many such articles I have read over the last 42 yrs of
reading political magazines.

No comment needed, just chipping in.

Ted Barker


--- On Thu, 14 Oct 1999 15:33:22 -0600 (MDT)  Dave Hughes <dave at oldcolo.com>
wrote:
Be aware, you who read this diatribe in Nation by Cumings, that West
Pointer's I know have been at Conferneces where he has spoken. They think
he is such a *extremist* in his views about the Korean War that he may
well be a Marxist. I am going to accuse him of it directly on the
editorial page of Nation.

Dave Hughes
dave at oldcolo.com
---------------End of Original Message-----------------

---------------------------------------------------------
Ted Barker:
The Korean War Project             (Online since 1/15/94)
http://www.koreanwar.org/          (Website since 2/15/95)
---10/14/99-------------------19:13:28-------------------




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From: "John Choe" <jocho25 at hotmail.com>
To: FriendsNetwork at egroups.com
Subject: [fwd]: Korean My Lai
Date: 1999 /Oct/14/10:11 AM


The Nation, October 25, 1999

Korean My Lai

Repressed memory is the ammunition of history, returning when one least
expects it to puncture the complacency of the present. Americans reacted
with palpable shock at learning the fate of several hundred Korean
civilians, machine-gunned to death by US soldiers in late July 1950 under a
bridge near Nogun village. The deeply researched Associated Press account of
this massacre made the front pages of major newspapers, leading some of them
to run for cover--like the Washington Post, which dismissed the massacre as
the unfortunate result of untrained soldiers facing an unknown enemy in the
early, chaotic stages of the Korean War. But this was not an isolated
incident. The Nogun massacre can help Americans understand what this
"forgotten war" was really about. It was a civil and unconventional war that
had its origins long before June 1950, and the official repositories of
historical truth in Washington and Seoul have been lying about its basic
nature for half a century.

Nogun village is located a couple of miles down the road from the county
seat of Yongdong in a remote and mountainous region where a strong,
indigenous left wing emerged just after Japanese imperialism collapsed in
Korea in August 1945. A county people's committee (a ubiquitous political
form at the time) took power from the Japanese and then watched as US civil
affairs teams grabbed the reins of government from it that fall. The teams
quickly re-employed Koreans who had served in the hated colonial police, as
part of the establishment of the US military government that ruled south of
the 38th Parallel for the next three years. After two years of political
turmoil, guerrilla war emerged in and around Yongdong county, long before
the "Korean War" began. According to a US doctor, Clesson Richards, who ran
a Salvation Army hospital in Yongdong from 1947 to 1950, "Guerrilla warfare
was around us all the time. We had many Commies as patients." The police
would "keep an eye on them," he blithely told a reporter, "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."

Shortly after US troops joined the battle in 1950, the 24th Infantry
Division suffered a "ghastly" defeat at Taejon, "one of the greatest ordeals
in Army history," according to military historian Clay Blair. As
backpedaling US forces tumbled southward from Taejon, they soon arrived in
Yongdong. North Korean sources said it had been "liberated" by local
guerrillas, something corroborated by the New York Times's Walter Sullivan,
who reported that some 300 guerrillas in and around Yongdong harassed the
retreating Americans. "The American G.I. is now beginning to eye with
suspicion any Korean civilian in the cities or countryside," Sullivan wrote.
On July 26 a Communist soldier wrote in his diary that US bombers had
swooped over Yongdong and "turned it into a sea of fire."

The popular and guerrilla element of the Korean War has been lost from the
collective memory, as if Vietnam were the only intervention where My Lais
occurred. But in 1950 what the people in "white pajamas" provoked in
Americans was as accessible as your barbershop reading table. What the
Pentagon could not find was reported, for example, by John Osborne in Life.
He told readers of the August 21, 1950, issue that US officers had ordered
GIs to fire on clusters of civilians; a soldier told him, "It's gone too far
when we are shooting children." It was a new kind of war, Osborne wrote,
with the "blotting out of villages where the enemy may be hiding; the
shelling of refugees who may include North Koreans." The commander of the
24th Infantry Division, Gen. John Church, said that Korea was not like the
European battles of World War II: "It's an entirely different kind of
warfare, this is really guerrilla warfare...essentially a guerrilla war over
rugged territory."

Official US sources have always denied that any massacres of civilians
occurred at any point in this three-year war. Routine denials by officers on
the scene in Yongdong were followed by official military histories that
blamed the North Koreans for all atrocities and by years of stonewalling by
two governments--right up to the Pentagon's claim for the past two years
that it found "no information that substantiates the claim." The offending
First Cavalry Division wasn't even in the area, it said. But it took me
exactly five minutes to find Clay Blair's statement in The Forgotten War,
based on declassified unit records, that "the 1st Cav would relieve the
shattered 24th Division at Yongdong" on July 22.

If, under President Clinton's prodding, the Pentagon proposes finally to
open up the real history of the Korean War, I can point out a couple of
places to begin. One week before the Nogun village incident, according to
ten witnesses who spoke to a North Korean Army detachment that arrived there
on July 20, US troops herded some 2,000 civilians into the mountains near
Yongdong and then slaughtered them, apparently mostly from the air, although
the account also said several women were raped before being shot. An
internal intelligence memorandum two months later, sent to Maj. Gen. Clark
Ruffner, suggested that the ubiquitous guerrillas could be dealt with by
organizing "assassination squads to carry out death sentences passed by ROK
Government in 'absentia' trials of guerrilla leaders."

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa defined that vexing
term "truth" in four ways: factual or forensic truth, personal or narrative
truth, social or "dialogue" truth, and healing or restorative truth. The
revelations of the Nogun village massacre establish all those meanings of
truth for the courageous survivors who have pressed their case against all
odds for years--those like Chun Choon Ja, a 12-year-old girl at the time,
who witnessed US soldiers "play[ing] with our lives like boys playing with
flies." For Americans, the forensic truths establish lies at all levels,
perpetrated for half a century, but they also (in the commission's words)
"reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public
discourse." It is now up to others to take the personal truths of the
survivors and turn them into a restorative truth, a requiem for the
"forgotten war" that might finally achieve the reconciliation that the two
Koreas have been denied since Dean Rusk first etched a line at the 38th
Parallel in August 1945.

Bruce Cumings

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Cumings teaches at the University of Chicago. His newest book is
Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End
of the Century (Duke).
----------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.thenation.com/issue/991025/1025cumings.shtml


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