PART II
July 26, 1950
No Gun Ri, South Korea
Cicadas filled the heavy air with their shrill insect drumming. Herons flapped lazily, long-necked, from paddy to abandoned paddy. Scattered clouds floated by. It was a good day for flying. “Visibility unrestricted,” American fighter pilots reported at midday.
The villagers, war refugees barely three miles from their smoldering homes, exhausted and fearful, had set down where the steep slopes of White Horse Mountain, rising 1,750 feet on their left, came down to meet a gentle bend in the main-line railroad. Several hundred yards ahead, the empty tracks crossed over the small double-arched concrete trestle near No Gun Ri, and then stretched on to Hwanggan. That town lay beyond the 600-foot-high ridge to the villagers’ right front.
Not far off, one hundred yards before the railroad bridge, a brook trickled down the slopes to run beneath the tracks via a five-foot-high culvert that cut crosswise through the railroad embankment. It was to this spot that little Chun Choon-ja hurried with a split gourd to fetch water for mixing with misookaroo for her family’s meal. Her mother, staying behind, was breast-feeding baby Tae-sung. Nearby, the many Yangs also mixed mud-colored misookaroo. In all the turmoil of the night and morning, they had eaten neither dinner nor breakfast.
Heat rose in waves off the railbed. People tethered their cows to bramble bushes and squeezed in under the sparse shade of the six-foot-high acacias. On the hillsides here and there, green-uniformed Americans popped in and out of sight, sometimes raising binoculars to their eyes. Others were near the tracks, keeping a watch on the Koreans.
These were not the same GIs who had led them from their homes. One had a radio pack on his back and a second used the handset to talk to someone, villagers remembered. An Asian-looking soldier trailed them, Chung Koo-hun said, and the teenaged villager appealed to him. “I said in Japanese, ‘Please help us.’ He seemed to sympathize. He said, ‘I’m sorry for you poor people,’ and he went away, as if he couldn’t do anything for us. I had a bad feeling about what was going on.”
The Americans hurried off. A light plane was flying overhead, engine droning, circling low over the refugees. “They must be counting us,” villagers told each other. “They’re trying to decide how many trucks they need to take us south.”
Hungry babies cried, and restless children shouted. Men opened their shirts to fan themselves with woven bamboo. Grandmothers, fretting, tried to rest. The cicadas hummed their eternal song.
* * *
Fifty miles to the southeast, in Taegu, Johnnie Walker’s Eighth Army staff had hastily established its headquarters in the gray wooden buildings of a local college campus. One roof sprouted tall antennas, and on this day an important message was radioed to General MacArthur in Tokyo, at his Far East Command offices overlooking the willows and swans of the Imperial Palace moat.
REFERENCE YOUR RADIO CITE 58460 DATED 23 JULY 50, General Walker’s message began.
The evening before, July 25, staff officers at Eighth Army had met with South Korean officials and put together their outline of steps for dealing with refugees, to guard against possible enemy infiltrators and keep the roads free. At ten this morning, July 26, the sketchy plan—for “controlled movement”—had been radioed to the two front-line divisions, the 1st Cavalry and the 25th Infantry. Now the Eighth Army chief was updating his supreme commander in response to MacArthur’s query about refugees three days earlier.
THE FOLLOWING ACTION HAS BEEN TAKEN BY THIS HQ TO CONTROL AND INTERROGATE ALL REFUGEES, the Walker message reported. NO MOVEMENT OF REFUGEES WILL BE PERMITTED THROUGH THE BATTLE LINES OF OUR FORWARD AREAS. Areas designated by American commanders will be evacuated, it said, and it went on briefly to list points of the plan.
Walker then concluded: REQUEST LEAFLETS BE PREPARED AND DROPPED BY YOUR HQ BY AIR OVER AREAS FORWARD AND REAR OF BATTLE LINES TO ASSIST IN THE TIMELY DISSEMINATION OF THIS INFORMATION. LEAFLET AIR DROPS TO BE ACCOMPLISHED UPON CALL OF THIS HQ.
The message was timed off by Eighth Army with military precision, at 1200—exactly noon.
* * *
Some of the refugees around the tracks recalled a last distinctive sound: soldiers blowing whistles.
In the next moment all such sounds were drowned out. A whine from over the horizon, from the direction of Hwanggan, grew instantly to a roar. Heads turned, looked up. From among the broken clouds American planes were dropping down toward them.
Ten-year-old Choon-ja was at the brook and culvert when she heard it and looked up, when the ground suddenly shook wildly and everything lifted into the air in an unearthly, deafening thunder, dirt and gravel from the railbed, bags and bushes and white clothing blasted upward, with people and parts of people. Again and again the earth rocked, and Choon-ja’s ears “went numb,” and suddenly midday was midnight amid dust, dirt and falling leaves, and planes again and again roared in, unleashing bombs or rockets, firing machine guns. “The ground was shaking and both my legs shook like walking on a small boat,” Choon-ja said. “I couldn’t see a thing, like walking in darkness.”
From every direction, in every direction, people were running, panicked, helpless, not knowing what was happening, children with hands over their ears, adults dragging children by their arms. Some scratched into the ground trying to hide. Others lay bloody and silent, dismembered, strewn about. Still others lay sprawled crying pitifully for help. Cows screamed. The limbs of people and animals rained down. As he lay on the ground, teenager Chung Koo-shik felt something hot land on his back. It was the head of a baby.
“It looked like heaven crashed on us,” Choon-ja said. “I threw away the water and ran to my mother. I found her moaning, breathing her last gasps. Part of her head was gone.” Tae-sung, the “Great Success” of a poor peasant wife, lay at her breast. The horrified grandmother pulled the bawling baby away. “Small fireballs flew everywhere,” Choon-ja said. “I heard the ‘ping-ping’ sounds of bullets flying past me. People fell around me. I ran this way and that, trying to run away from the explosions. I cried. I couldn’t find my father. Suddenly there seemed to be no one I could recognize.”
Villagers said “fireballs” from some kind of heavy weapon came from the hills, that soldiers on the ground had opened fire on them. The planes, two to four, flew off. But the killing went on. Families, every few feet, were being torn apart bit by bit, life by life.
Yang Hae-sook was saved by her mother, who somehow dragged the thirteen-year-old “Golden Girl” and two of her brothers, ten-year-old Hae-chan and six-year-old Hae-yong, under an acacia tree, where she covered them with her body and skirt. But their grandmother, the reluctant old woman who wanted only to cling to Im Ke Ri, had been blown to pieces. The pregnant cousin, with bullets in her legs, crawled over to Hae-sook’s mother, terrified, crying, “Aunt! My son has his eyes open but he’s not making a sound!” The baby was dead. His wide-open eyes stared out in frozen wonder, and the children gaped, dumbstruck. Nearby, Hae-sook’s uncle, cowering behind his barley sack and trying to shield a daughter, suddenly cried out. Hae-sook recalled her shock: “He was flipping over in pain. I saw the intestines coming out of his belly. They were blue. He screamed three times and then he was silent.” Struck by the same bullet, his thirteen-year-old girl lay under him, also dying.
Freeze frames of horror were burned forever into young survivors’ minds. The seventeen-year-old student Chung Koo-hun, unscathed under a thick quilt, looked up through the smoke and saw people climbing a nearby hillside, only to be cut down by American soldiers’ fire. One eight-year-old girl struggled out from beneath her mother to find a large hole in the woman’s head and to see her father writhing, dying. Another survivor would never forget the sight of a dead man’s legs pointing up toward the sky.
Park Hee-sook darted back and forth, the pigtailed sixteen-year-old first following one panicked group, then another, as gunfire rattled around them. Then she saw her sister, the nervous new mother, lying on the tracks. “Blood was spurting from a hole in her left breast, and her hips and legs were shaking and convulsing,” Hee-sook said. “She said, ‘Water, water.’ I cannot forget her eyes, the way she looked at me. Did she know it was me?… I found a small pool of water in a ditch. I cupped the water with my hands and brought it to my sister. I fetched water one more time and when I tried to give it to her, she stopped breathing. She died just like that.”
Craters now dented the embankment, its rails twisted grotesquely in the air. Wounded lay moaning, baggage burning beneath thick smoke that hung everywhere. A cow bellowed in agony, ablaze with the bags on its back. Ten-year-old Hae-chan saw such infernal sights, but sister Hae-sook no longer could. Her right eye was clotted shut with blood. Her left eye was gone.
An explosion beside them at the acacia tree had flung a “fireball” into the girl’s face, a flash that struck her like a big stone. She recovered to find her eye blown out. Hae-chan saw it dangling below his sister’s face, “bigger than a fist,” hanging on gossamer threads. “My eye!” the girl screamed. “My eye!” She begged a neighbor woman to pluck it off, but the woman took fright and ran. Finally Hae-sook grasped it in her own fist. She yanked it, broke it off herself, and then the tall, conscientious thirteen-year-old, the “Golden Girl” who wanted dearly just to go to school, threw her eye away.
* * *
Some GIs could see, some couldn’t, from the scattered hillside positions of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry. For some it may have been almost a mile away, through the haze of heat. But others knew what was happening. Some were involved.
“They come down pretty low. You could see that star on that plane real easy—about three planes,” said Eugene Hesselman, a corporal and Captain Chandler’s clerk in H Company. “They dropped a bomb. That’s where a lot of the people got hit with shrapnel.… A lot of them got killed.”
After two nights at the warfront, shooting at phantoms and retreating from rumors, these untested infantrymen were now getting their first close look at an air strike. They didn’t know what to make of it. Hesselman thought it was a mistake. He said Captain Chandler himself had asked for a strike, but against North Korean artillery far up toward Yongdong, not on the refugees. “They were kind of shortening up the zone and hit them. They hit us, too, some of our troops.” But there was nothing that looked like artillery or tanks among the refugees, and other GIs saw no mistake. “I thought it was intentional,” said Herman Patterson, a rifleman who watched from a hillside foxhole in F Company.
The attack fit the policy the Air Force was pursuing at the Army’s request, to “strafe all civilian refugee parties that are noted approaching our positions,” the practice that Col. Turner Rogers, in his secret memo to the generals on Tuesday, just a day earlier, warned would embarrass the United States before the world. It also fit the instructions to Navy pilots: Attack any group of more than eight people.
Hap Gay, the 1st Cavalry Division commander, evidently supported such strafings. At division headquarters this very day, Wednesday, July 26, the general praised the “wonderful” Air Force support he had gotten. “God has been good to us on the weather,” he added, and when asked by reporters about “heavy refugee movements” spotted by air reconnaissance, the general, in his fifth day as a combat commander, replied that he was sure most of the white-clad people on the road were North Korean guerrillas.
Eighteen miles northwest of Gay’s schoolhouse headquarters, in the blood and fire near No Gun Ri, Pfc. Delos Flint would have told the general otherwise. The F Company rifleman, one of the GIs caught in the strafing, remembered pushing into a low, narrow culvert with terrified refugee families, probably the one where Choon-ja fetched water. “It was like a hornet’s nest in there.… It was civilians just trying to hide,” Flint said. Then somebody started shooting in at them. “One of my buddies got hit. Shot off part of his privates. Hurt him bad. We was in there hours. Then we come out little by little.”
* * *
One civilian trying to hide in the culvert was a thirteen-year-old with a special burden. In the blinding showers of gravel and shrapnel, Park Chang-rok, an Im Ke Ri boy, lost track of his parents. His little sister was still with him. He clapped the four-year-old to his back and ran straight for the small culvert, a place he knew from visits to his grandparents at No Gun village. He was the first to find it, then others piled in, covered with dirt and blood. Bursts of gunfire suddenly rattled through the tight, 200-foot-long passage. “The ricochets were ear-splitting,” Chang-rok said. “Pieces of concrete hit my face.”
Above, in the chaos around the tracks, Chun Choon-ja ran aimlessly, sobbing, her mother dead, her father missing. She heard a shout, “Choon-ja!” It was her grandfather, unharmed, his rice-straw mat harnessed neatly to his back. He grabbed her. They stumbled down the embankment to the culvert. “There were already a lot of people, maybe fifty people, when we got there,” she said. “Some seemed to be dead already. As we hugged in there, I saw the flashes when bullets hit the concrete wall.” The confined space shook from a blast, possibly a mortar round. They felt they had to get out, or die.
“My grandfather held my hand again,” Choon-ja said. Rushing back out into the harsh afternoon sun, the ten-year-old saw her white skirt soaked red with other people’s blood. She saw a woman sprawled dead, an infant wailing next to her. She ran beside the embankment, along a ditch toward the big tunnels, the tall openings under the No Gun Ri trestle. Bullets flew on all sides. She somehow became separated from her grandfather. “I was crying and following whoever was in front of me.”
Chang-rok ran with his little sister on his back. “I still remember big bullets kicking up dirt right in front of my eyes. People running in front of me were hit and fell,” he said. “I tumbled and crawled over the dead people, and I don’t know how I made it to the big tunnels.” Choon-ja made it, too, and ran straight through one of the two towering underpasses to the other side. There she found her grandfather, face down in a small sandy flat, his rolled-up mat still tied to his back. The old man had tried to reach the road and was cut down by American gunfire coming from still another direction. The little girl sank deeper into shock: “The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies.”
* * *
For most of these teenaged American infantrymen, only days from the taxi dancers and neon streets of Tokyo, it was the first time they had fired their weapons in Korea. The barracks inspections, the manuals, the field training in Japan didn’t prepare them for this kind of war, in this strange land, among strange people. The recruiting sergeants never told them. Hollywood war movies gave no hint. Buddy Wenzel, the dropout who found his “out” in the Army, had no idea what he might be asked to do someday.
“Word came through the line, open fire on them,” Wenzel recalled. “They were running toward us and we opened fire.” The Koreans seemed “confused,” he said. “We understood that we were fighting for these people, but we had orders to fire on them and we did.” The mind of this young man, the sad boy who raised two small sisters back in New Jersey, was then and there, at No Gun Ri, imprinted with its own freeze frame: of a little girl caught in the sights of his M-1. “I think I shot her.”
A “little girl” claimed her place in others’ memories, too. “She came running toward us. You should have seen guys trying to kill that little girl with machine guns,” said James McClure, who was in a 2nd Battalion reconnaissance squad. “She was crying and she ran back into that mess, and I guess the mortars got her.”
For Ralph Bernotas, what lodged in the mind was the distant sight of a “fountain” of white clothing, of refugees’ bodies “splashing” into the air with the impact of shells. “Seeing that mortar fire coming in on that mass of people was very hard to take,” said the altar boy from the coal country.
Not every man remembered the “fountain.” Not every man remembered the little girl or small culvert. During these days dug in before Hwanggan, soldiers were in different foxholes over many hundreds of yards of twisting terrain, with different views, different jobs, different comings and goings. Some in the 660-man battalion may have seen little of the refugee killings. Some may have seen other refugees who approached U.S. lines at No Gun Ri before the Chu Gok Ri group, or the next day. Blank spots of memory, the disappearance of records, the reluctance of many veterans to discuss those days—all contributed to gaps and inconsistencies from the American perspective. In the end, however, the soldiers’ memories from July 1950 at No Gun Ri fit neatly with those of the Korean survivors into a mosaic of wholesale death whose backdrop, whose official design, none forgot. As Bernotas explained, “Our orders were not to let any refugees through any line at all.”
* * *
Scores of survivors scattered safely away into the hills or fields after the air strike. Chung Koo-hun, the tall student lying low, was one of the last to leave the tracks. He ran back in the direction of Yongdong and ducked into another small culvert to hide. But American soldiers flushed him out and sent him back toward the trestle.
Smoke drifted over the deathly landscape. Soldiers converged on the scene, villagers recalled, checking bodies with a nudge of their boots, gathering people on the tracks, on the adjacent hillside, in the small field between the tracks and road, and herding them toward the trestle. Parents carried children. People supported wounded relatives who could walk. Sobbing, or in silent shock, they slowly shuffled toward the cavernous tunnels under the bridge. “On the way I saw baggage and dying cows and human bodies scattered about,” Koo-hun said. “I saw limbs torn apart. I even saw heads separated from bodies. It was dark because of the smoke and dirt cloud and debris. I stumbled on bodies. I could only see a bit of clear sky to the south. Then I heard gunshots again, and I hurried into the big tunnels.”
The teenaged villager had seen something more as well, before the GIs caught up with him. When he first ran from the scene, he said, he heard shots, looked back, and saw what appeared to be soldiers shooting point-blank at wounded who could not move to the tunnels.
The girl Chun Choon-ja was at one point part of a group rounded up by GIs. “The soldiers had us kneel down with our hands on the back of our heads and look at the ground,” she said. “When a few people raised their heads and pleaded for help, they threatened to hit them with the butts of their rifles and threatened to shoot.”
The Yangs lay bloodied, the mother crippled with leg wounds, daughter Hae-sook virtually blind. The father had disappeared. Ten-year-old Hae-chan watched as soldiers approached the family with bayonets fixed to their M-1s. “They touched us with the tips of their bayonets and motioned to us to get up and move,” he remembered. “Go! Go!” their mother told the children. “Hurry!” But they cried and refused to leave her, and finally the four of them, with their wounded six-year-old brother hobbling along, began to move.
“Mother used a stick with one hand and Hae-chan held Mother’s other hand. He also held my hand,” Hae-sook said. “We began moving. Mother couldn’t stand up, so she dragged herself on the ground. We moved over the tracks and bodies that way. I kept tripping over bodies because I couldn’t see well. Before we moved out of the shrubs, I opened the other eye with my hand. Then I saw the baby with his eyes wide open. My mother said, ‘Leave him there. He’s already dead.’”
They moved so slowly that the boy Hae-chan, terrified, thought the soldiers behind them would shoot. He all but dragged his mother and sister, past the burning bushes, past the broken bodies of neighbors, past the violet wildflowers. Finally, painfully, they crept into one of the trestle tunnels, and descended into hell.
The vaulted ceilings of the two concrete underpasses were forty feet high. Each underpass was twenty-two feet across and eighty feet long. The shallow stream ran mostly through the tunnel on the eastern, Hwanggan side, with a bit trickling through the other. The dry streambed in that western underpass served as a path from the main road to No Gun Ri, whose huts sat three hundred yards away. The western tunnel held most of the people, both dead and alive. Some Koreans at the trestle had already been shot, especially by soldiers dug in on a low rise about two hundred yards away, across the main road.
When she entered the tunnel, after leaving her dead sister on the tracks, Park Hee-sook remembered seeing babies crawling around dead or unconscious mothers. “It was already a living hell there.” Park Sun-yong staggered into the underpass with her Bible and two small children. She had survived with a shrapnel wound in her right arm. The children, Koo-pil and Koo-hee, and her husband Eun-yong’s parents had survived, too. But Sun-yong could see the horror had not ended. “The entrance to the tunnel was so thick with bodies strewn everywhere, I could hardly walk without stepping on them.”
Inside, it was bedlam. Frantic villagers cried out children’s names. Boys and girls screamed for their mothers and fathers. Family groups crawled to the safest spots, away from the road, shoving and pushing for space on the jam-packed sandy floor. Choon-ja’s grandmother finally glanced out toward the road and saw a man’s body with a straw mat on its back. “There’s my husband!” she wailed, but she dared not go to him.
Gunfire rang through the tunnel sporadically through the afternoon, villagers said. “I couldn’t get my senses back. You couldn’t even raise your head,” Sun-yong said. “It looked like the Americans were shooting at us out of boredom,” said Koo-hun. Some refugees were shot trying to climb back up the embankment to fetch food from abandoned bags. Some were shot when, desperately thirsty, they ventured outside for stream water.
Across the road, in an American foxhole up the low slope, a young Korean looked on helplessly. Big brother Park Chang-rok, with his four-year-old sister clinging to him, was there with a machine gun team that opened fire repeatedly on people around the railroad. “I pleaded with them not to shoot,” he said. “I rubbed my hands together, and I jumped up and down. I told them my parents were not bad people. But, of course, they didn’t seem to understand me.”
Chang-rok had been saved by the soldiers. After running from the small culvert, the thirteen-year-old scooped out a hole in the sand near the trestle, put his sister in it and lay on top. “My parents used to tell me I should always take care of my little sister,” he said. Two GIs passed by, rifles at the ready, and poked him with the barrels. The boy got up, hands together, begging for their lives. “I thought both of us were dead because I saw people killed by GIs,” Chang-rok said. But the sight of two children stacked in a hole seemed to surprise the soldiers. Instead of shooting, they gestured for the boy to go with them. “I threw my little sister on my back and followed them to the small hill across the road, facing the tunnels,” and to safety.
Such acts occurred here and there amid the bloodletting. U.S. Army medics came to the trestle at one point on Wednesday, the day the shootings started, to treat and bandage wounded, villagers said.
Another small group or two of soldiers also appeared outside the underpasses that afternoon, the Koreans said. The besieged refugees stirred and a few went out to beg for the villagers’ lives. Urged by elders who stayed behind, university student Koo-il took the lead the first time. Koo-hun, the tall seventeen-year-old, stood back and watched. “According to my cousin Koo-il, who spoke a little English, the soldiers told him that they were shooting at us under orders,” Koo-hun said. When he returned to the tunnel, villagers remembered, Koo-il told them, “We are now all dead.” His sister, schoolteacher Koo-ok, later went out and she “held the soldier’s arm and begged, but they pushed her aside and went away,” after first taking a good look into the tunnel, Koo-hun said. Villager Suh Jong-ja, then nineteen, also remembered a Japanese-speaking soldier telling one old woman they were firing under orders.
Inside, it was suffocatingly hot. The refugees’ thirst was overwhelming, particularly for the wounded. The villagers lay, more than three hundred of them by their own estimate, huddled in groups, some dead, many alive, some dying. They tried to keep quiet amid the drone of flies.
With all the bursts of fire, survivors’ memories did not agree on when the first big barrage began—around dusk that day, later that night, early the next morning. But they remembered seeing sparks on the hillsides—fusillades from .30-caliber machine guns and M-1 rifles—and then a rain of death.
Hae-sook, unseeing, heard the bullets flying “like bees around me” and heard them striking her neighbors “like beans in a frying pan.” Hundreds of deadly rounds rang echoing, ricocheting off the concrete walls. Tracers, the fiery bullets machine gunners use for aiming, spun overhead or slammed red-hot into bodies. Gunfire came from both ends of the underpasses, villagers said. When it started on one side, the terrified refugees rushed toward the other. When it came from there, they crawled back over bodies again. Each time, fewer and fewer moved.
Heavy shelling also shook the tunnels, the villagers said, and possibly a new attack by warplanes—“terrible explosions, day and night,” Sun-yong said. When the mortar or artillery rounds hit, said Koo-hun, “I thought the tunnels would collapse on us.” People closer to the entrances were blown apart. One girl, hiding under a blanket, was struck by something heavy and sat up. It was a dismembered leg.
Survivors clung close to the inner wall. They clawed into the sandy floor and began to build barricades of bodies. One woman placed traditional offerings of rice and water before her on the tunnel floor and prayed for mercy. Dreadful sounds and mad scenes played out across the blood-soaked sand. Deep into the night, with so many dead or wounded, survivors could hear one wounded villager calling his daughter’s name over and over, “Jong-boon. Jong-boon.” As he bled to death, with his last breath, he still called the girl. Jong-boon had escaped during the bombing.
Survivors grew terrified that any sound or movement would draw more fire. When the motherless baby Tae-sung, still in his grandmother’s arms, would not stop crying, others hissed hysterically, threateningly at Choon-ja’s family. The half-crazed father grabbed his “Great Success” from the old woman, tried to leave the tunnel, but retreated when gunfire rang out. Witnesses said he then went to the other underpass and dropped the howling infant, the son he always wanted, face down into the stream. The baby jerked a few times, then lay still.
In a trench far across the road, the stranded thirteen-year-old Park Chang-rok sat in wonder at what he was seeing and hearing around him, and at the men behind the guns, big men, Americans who seemed like normal people. “They didn’t appear to be people who would kill fellow human beings.”
* * *
It was reported in the American press on this July 26 that U.S. Army Reserve medical officers were not volunteering for Korean duty in the numbers needed. The war was not stirring doctors’ patriotism. A New York Times article noted a special problem emerging among the young soldiers in Korea: “Reports from the fighting area advised medical officers that cases of psychoneurosis were expected to run higher than, as a spokesman put it, ‘in other operations.’” For all July, more psychiatric casualties would be evacuated than seriously wounded men.
On the front line at No Gun Ri, men remembered fellow soldiers recoiling in their foxholes, revolted, from what they were seeing or doing. The shock wasn’t limited to the enlisted ranks. At the 2nd Battalion command post, close behind the line positions, battalion commander Herb Heyer seemed shaken when the order was passed down to fire on a refugee group, one of his communications corporals remembered. “I was within ten yards and I could tell by his face that there was nothing that he liked about it,” said James Crume. “It was an emotional thing, I’m sure. He would just lie back—sit back—there on the side of the hill and shake his head.”
Crume remembered a refugee group in the open being hit by battalion mortar rounds, but radioman Larry Levine, a staff sergeant at Heyer’s command post, remembered an hours-long “standoff” with refugees at the trestle, after which an order came down around dusk—from the 1st Cavalry Division or higher, Levine believed—to eliminate them. First mortars were fired, he said, and then “a feeding frenzy took place, once it started.… Guys were shooting because they hadn’t shot before, and they had permission to shoot.… It’s like, ‘Hey, shoot at anything that moves out there.’”
Down among the machine gunners and mortarmen of H Company, Mel Chandler, the congenial captain who had never seen combat, had gotten on the radio to battalion to ask what to do, his clerk Gene Hesselman said. Then, “I remember Chandler saying we got to get rid of all of them. He couldn’t on his own. Evidently the division give it to him because he said, ‘Let them have it.’”
Rifleman Joe Jackman, in G Company, remembered refugees coming under fire in the open—“running around like bees were after them”—possibly after the initial strafing. It came down the line, he said: “Open fire!” He also recalled the sound of the refugees. “Christ Almighty, they were just screaming. Who wouldn’t scream? The fear—I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, what the hell are we into?’”
“We was holding that railroad bridge to keep them from coming across that,” remembered Melvin Durham of F Company. “But those people—there was women, children, old people—we had to eliminate them.… Our orders was to start opening fire and when we did, there wasn’t nothing standing but a couple of cows. We fired for about an hour, an hour and a half.”
Fox Company’s Delos Flint, having escaped from the culvert, wanted no part of killing civilians. “I wouldn’t fire at anybody in the tunnel like that.… It was unnecessary to kill them.… A lot of guys, the orders just went in one ear and out the other.” Others also remembered men refusing to fire. But many GIs—confused, angry, hearing rumors on their second full day at war—did not hesitate. “If you let refugees through, you get shot in the back,” said Norm Tinkler, the nineteen-year-old machine gunner. “We was just kids, and I was scared.… I ricocheted them in there. I knew how to shoot. Oh, I could see about that much of the wall that was going through the tunnel, and I put it on that.” But Tinkler was torn, too. He said he prayed, “Please God, if I make it home alive, don’t let me have sons, because I couldn’t bear for a son of mine to go through this.”
From a distance, Cpl. Tom Hacha of the 7th Cavalry’s newly arrived 1st Battalion saw tracers bouncing through the underpass, fired by one of the 500-rounds-a-minute machine guns. “To me it was like one of these mistakes where, ‘Jesus, stop it, turn it off.’ It was like somebody was firing out of fear, just shooting. I knew that people were being killed there. The refugees, they tried to get out but they couldn’t. It was a terrible shock.”
Mortarmen, machine gunners and riflemen blasted away from their ragged holes on the dusty, barren hillsides, in the 7th Cavalry’s first big encounter with the “gooks” in Korea. “We just annihilated them,” Tinkler said. “It was about like an Indian raid, back in the old days.”
The burly Pfc. Delos Flint, who had been trapped with the “people in white,” was half Cherokee Indian. He felt differently. “If you ever saw them,” he said, “they were wonderful people.”
* * *
Long after the sun set bloody red, as the moonlight fled the darkening tunnel that night, Kim Ke-soon came to Chung Koo-hun. The teenaged village girl whose eyes had met his in Chu Gok Ri’s pathways was not supposed to talk to young men, let alone come so close. “Ke-soon came to me and hugged me,” Koo-hun remembered. “It was something unimaginable.”
In this place of mangled flesh and suffering, she was on a mission of hope. “She told me that I should try to get out because I was a man,” he said. “She said we were going to die whether we stayed or tried to get out. She said men should try to get out and tell people what happened.” Other women were telling their husbands and sons the same. In their clumsy hanbok skirts, with children, the women would never get far, but stealthier young men might—and possibly find help.
About ten younger men stripped off their white clothes and smeared their bodies with camouflaging mud. One father gave his son the family deed and family lineage book. One son refused to leave his father. The men crawled out the opening on the No Gun Ri side, away from the main road. Later, as the night deepened, other men, and some women, slipped away. Not all survived.
Koo-hun left behind the sick eight-year-old brother, Koo-hak, he had carried on his back. “I thought I was a coward to leave my brother and family in there,” he said. “But I hoped for the best.” Fear and cowardice, duty and devotion, self-preservation and guilt—ultimate emotions tore at the hearts of the villagers. One young man, Chun Choon-ja’s newlywed uncle, chose to remain with his bride. When it was over, they found him sitting with her in the underpass, hugging her protectively. Both were dead.
In a momentary lull before the young men escaped, after the horrifying first barrage, the surviving refugees suddenly heard a woman moaning, panting in pain, then shrieking. Villager Cho Nam-il’s wife was in labor on a blanket on the tunnel floor, with her mother-in-law as a midwife. Finally, with a long sustained cry, she delivered a boy. Then the gunfire erupted again, and the woman’s father-in-law was wounded in the shoulder. Moving toward him, the mother-in-law was struck and killed instantly by a bullet. The fallen old man begged to be taken home to die. His son, the new father, lifted him onto his back and summoned his wife. She cried out that she had been wounded in the wrist and couldn’t take the baby. The young man hesitated, then finally told her to leave the child. The three slipped out into the night. The baby whimpered and struggled on the floor, but eventually grew quiet and still.
A second woman also gave birth under the trestle, the wife of thirteen-year-old Chang-rok’s cousin Park Chang-ha. The father was shot dead as he tried to climb to the tracks to find food for his wife. The mother, Han Soon-suk, and her newborn were killed soon after. Other women also would be found dead with their babies under the trestle. Some infants were lifeless; a few clung to their mothers’ breasts and to life.
* * *
“In general there was little action along the entire front,” Eighth Army headquarters reported this day from Taegu. But Gen. Johnnie Walker, privately, was deeply worried, especially by the poor performance of the 1st Cavalry Division. He personally called Tokyo to seek permission to withdraw his headquarters even farther back, to the southern port of Pusan.
To bolster the faltering Army, the U.S. Air Force’s young F-80 jet pilots were “scorching the earth,” unleashing tons of bombs and streams of lead over South Korea during the day and returning to their bases in Japan to spend the night with their families. As the terror was unfolding hourly at the No Gun Ri tunnels, wave after wave of fighter-bombers attacked Yongdong, seven miles to the west, the town where the North Koreans had stopped, and where Chu Gok Ri villagers had sold their rice and firewood, where the Chungs had their dried-fish shops, where Chung Koo-hun and others went to school, where farmers’ children might find musicians and clowns, where the Salvation Army ran a hospital.
An Associated Press reporter, flying overhead, reported that Yongdong “no longer exists as a city. It looks like Nagasaki after the atom bomb.… Yongdong has probably been here for 4,000 years—and never known such silence.” The fires raged into the night. In Yongdong’s streets and burning homes lay bodies of South Koreans who had not tried to flee south.
* * *
In the first gray light next morning, those looking across the tunnel floor were both blessed and damned. They were alive while most were dead. But they might be next.
The half-blinded Yang Hae-sook and her younger brother Hae-chan helped their wounded mother move deeper inside the tunnel, up against the wall. The ten-year-old boy, son of a loyal son, somehow dragged and shifted body after body to build a wall around his mother. The children’s aunt, Yang Mal-soon, very large in the eighth month of pregnancy, had barely survived the first night with severe wounds. In her dying agony, she asked her nine-year-old girl to strangle her with her cloth belt. In the end she simply faded. The daughter, Hwa-ja, was carrying her four-year-old sister that second day when “I heard bullets whistling by my ears, and then half of her head was gone.” She laid the little girl down. The Yang family was being destroyed, one by one.
Heavy nighttime fusillades of machine-gun fire gave way in daylight to potshots and flurries of bullets that kept the survivors pinned down. Anyone who moved risked drawing fire. The heat and the stench among the swelling, putrefying bodies and puddles of blood were overwhelming. Hunger ravished the survivors. But thirst, more than anything, moved them. The water trickling through the western tunnel had pooled behind the mounds of dead and grown viscous with blood. When Hae-chan tried to bring water to his mother, “I found the surface thick with blood. When I pushed it aside, it cracked like a mud cake.”
The pigtailed Park Hee-sook had watched that first afternoon as her father and then her mother were killed. She heard her dead sister’s baby daughter crying, somewhere. “I am sure she died of starvation.” The sixteen-year-old clawed away at bodies, pulling aside arms and legs to hide herself beneath the dead. “I could hear blood flowing down, the sound of blood gurgling out of the bodies,” she remembered. Her throat was burning; she gulped down what she found on the floor. “I drank like a mad person.… The horrible thing was that blood kept flowing down from the bodies above me. So I couldn’t really tell whether I drank blood or water.”
After some hours, when it grew quiet, Hee-sook finally wriggled her way free, and walked unsteadily to the tunnel entrance. “I could see a lot of soldiers on the hills,” she said. “I said, ‘Hello, hello.’ That was the only English word I knew. I said more loudly, ‘Hello, hello.’ I cried and began explaining that both my father and mother were dead. I didn’t care whether they understood me. Then I said, ‘Hello, hello’ again.”
An American looked at her through binoculars. He beckoned her to the hill. “Soldiers climbed out of their foxholes and looked at me.” She was coated in blood, from long pigtail on down. She screamed and cried that they had killed her parents, and pounded on them with her fists. “They couldn’t understand, but they knew where I came from. They just looked at me, at what they had done.”
Hee-sook was saved, as were some others. In the deadly chaos of the first afternoon, Chun Choon-ja, the motherless ten-year-old, was swept up in a wandering group of about ten refugees that, for some reason, was summoned by soldiers instead of shot. They filed across a low earthen dike between rice paddies and reached the hillside foxholes. “They gave us something to eat, maybe chocolate, but I didn’t eat it. I just cried. My mind and my eyes kept turning back to my grandfather,” Choon-ja said.
The merciless shooting went on, too, and on the second day American warplanes returned to No Gun Ri, survivors said. They remembered the pilots dropping bombs or firing rockets at the trestle, and making repeated machine-gun strafing runs—“as if the planes flew through the tunnel,” one said.
In the deafening noise and the clatter of splintered concrete, in the dusky shadows of the concrete arches, young mother Sun-yong lay weak from hunger and crushed with grief. Just a month earlier, she and Eun-yong had risked a perilous ride on this very railroad to get their two children to the safety of Yongdong County. Now her husband was lost somewhere in this war, and she had only one child left to protect, because Koo-hee, the two-year-old, was dead.
Koo-hee had begun wailing hungrily, her face red, on the first afternoon. Her grandmother picked the child up and, confused, distraught, walked outside. “I don’t know why she went out,” Sun-yong said. “Everyone who stepped out was killed.” Gunfire rattled. A bullet pierced little Koo-hee’s neck, killing her. The grandmother dropped the baby and struggled back inside, wounded in the shoulder and buttocks.
That night, Sun-yong’s father-in-law and her husband’s two younger brothers slipped out of the tunnel. The grandfather said he believed the Americans might cease firing if they saw only women and children. Sun-yong tried to flee, too, with four-year-old Koo-pil and the Chung family’s houseboy. They didn’t get far. Bodies blocked their hillside path and they rushed back inside, shaken.
Her boy’s hungry cries grew more insistent. Lives were bleeding away around her, and her circle of family was dwindling. Her sister-in-law, Min Young-ok, wife of Eun-yong’s brother the prison guard, at some point died in a pool of blood, with her baby boy beside her fatally wounded. “I began praying,” Sun-yong said. “I became determined to save my remaining child.” She decided to try to escape again the second night, to rejoin Eun-yong, wherever he was.
They moved slowly away from the tunnel. The fifteen-year-old house servant, Kim Hong-ki, carried Koo-pil on his back. “Aunt Park seemed hardly able to walk,” Hong-ki recalled. It took them hours to move a few hundred yards in the direction of Hwanggan, hiding from gunfire, searchlights and flares. Then, when they were climbing a hill, gunfire rang out again. She heard Koo-pil cry, “Eum-ma!”—“Mama!” He was standing, his legs ripped by bullets, and Hong-ki was running back down the hill. She tore cloth from her skirt and bound the boy’s legs, and then prayed. Koo-pil kept asking for his father.
As a faint first light came from the east, she began carrying him up the hill again. “I didn’t walk far when I saw an American soldier,” she said. “The soldier was carrying his rifle.” Desperately, in Korean, she begged him not to shoot, said they weren’t bad people, they weren’t communists. “But he fired at us. It was like some big hammer slamming my body. I fell back and all consciousness seemed to flow out of me.… I thought this was the end of my life. Then I heard Koo-pil saying, or maybe I imagined I heard him, ‘Eum-ma, Eum-ma.’ I lifted myself a little bit and looked back. Blood was spreading from the small body of my child.”
He had been hit in the chest. “I saw the thin hair trembling in the breeze on Koo-pil’s forehead,” she recalled. “I lay still, my mind blank. Two soldiers came over, a fat one and a tall one. They looked down at us and talked to each other. Later more soldiers came and they wrapped my son in a white bag.” She heard shoveling. “They took me to an ambulance. That day I saw the two faces of America. I just don’t know what got into their heads to kill my boy like that. I just don’t know. The Americans must have gone crazy.”
Sun-yong carried something else with her from the tunnels, her Bible, and she would always believe the soldiers saw it and decided to spare this blood-spattered woman, lying there with her dead boy, muttering the Lord’s Prayer in Korean. The young mother, finally delivered from evil, had been asking her Lord to take her, too.
* * *
“To the patriarchs, primates, archbishops…” on the day the killing began, Pope Pius XII, by happenstance of fate, summoned a kind of vision of No Gun Ri. “Let us all remember what war brings, which, alas, we know from experience; nothing but ruin, death and every kind of misery,” the pope declared in “Supreme Grief,” an antiwar encyclical issued July 26 in far-off Rome. “Such murderous and inhuman weapons have been introduced and developed as can destroy not only armies and fleets … but also innocent children with their mothers, those who are sick and the helpless aged.” The “rulers of peoples,” the pope wrote in his severe Latin, bore a special responsibility to dispel the dark clouds of war.
In Washington on the day the killings began, the rulers were focusing not on war, but on dollars and cents. Truman’s economic advisers reported “the highest levels of peacetime prosperity ever achieved.” But the president cautioned that the new war “will be costly.” Americans should be prepared to pay higher taxes, he said.
In the Far East, the chief prosecutor of the war, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, flew to Korea from Tokyo on that second day, July 27. Alarmed by General Walker’s plan to retreat further, he went to Taegu to tell his Eighth Army chief that his unsteady divisions must stand. Then, to the press, MacArthur praised the front-line commanders for “superior efficiency” and the Air Force for having “done everything possible for them to do.” Turning to South Korean officials, the American supreme commander grandly assured them, “We are going to take care of your country.”
Closer to the front that day, the 25th Infantry Division’s Gen. William Kean—also in his first combat command, like the 1st Cavalry Division’s Hap Gay—declared South Korea’s “people in white” a target for his troops. Three days earlier, the instructions had gone out in Gay’s neighboring division to “fire everyone” trying to cross U.S. lines. Now Kean issued an order to all his units, accompanied by a map, saying that civilians were to have been evacuated from an extensive area—the entire war zone—and therefore “all civilians seen in this area are to be considered as enemy and action taken accordingly.” Logs showed his staff relayed this as “considered as unfriendly and shot.”
Kean, like General Gay, feared that North Koreans were using refugee columns on the roads to infiltrate behind his lines. On this same day, however, in a repeat of what happened at Yongdong, North Korean troops simply poured over the countryside into a large gap between the two American divisions and attacked the 25th’s left flank, somewhere off to the right of the 7th Cavalry at No Gun Ri.
The 7th Cavalry’s other battalion, the 1st, had moved into the line next to the 2nd Battalion by Wednesday evening, July 26. Now, on July 27, the two battalions were receiving sporadic long-distance artillery and mortar fire from the North Koreans, but the regiment generally reported “all quiet on both battalion fronts.”
* * *
By Friday, July 28, their third day in hell, the survivors were mostly children, burrowed under dead parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, or under someone else’s family, starving, parched, lapping up whatever liquid they sensed around them, in a waking nightmare but alive—because of guardians living and dead.
In a furious barrage the second night, a thirteen-year-old boy named Chung Koo-ho and his sister were pressed protectively against the tunnel wall by his mother. Shrapnel gouged his left arm and leg. Then he heard his mother moaning. In the darkness, he found she was wounded many times. By morning, she was gone, facedown in the sand. But through the night this peasant woman did the only thing left to a dying mother. “She was a devout Buddhist,” Koo-ho said. “She kept muttering to Buddha. In her dying breath, she was praying for a good life in the next world for herself and her two children.”
An eight-year-old Chu Gok village girl, Kim Sung-ja, lost consciousness amid the bullets and shrapnel. “I don’t know how much time had passed. When I tried to get up, I could hardly move. I was underneath my mother’s body. When I struggled, other survivors pulled me out. My mother was holding me, and that apparently saved me.”
A shard of sound told little Sung-ja she was alive. “I woke up hearing the water flowing and the birds chirping outside.” After two dry days, it rained on Friday in Korea.
* * *
Afterward, some soldiers believed they had been fired on from beneath the trestle. “Every now and then you’d hear a shot, like a rifle shot,” Cpl. Gene Hesselman said. “I just heard people talk about it,” said George D. Preece, a sergeant in Captain Chandler’s H Company. “Whether that’s right or not, that’s what I heard.”
But any such shots, veterans acknowledged, may have been ricochets of American bullets fired from the tunnels’ other side. Some GIs never heard gunfire from the underpasses and never heard about it. “No, no one ever said anything about them firing out on the troops,” said G Company’s James Elkins. “To say they was firing out, I don’t know,” said F Company’s Melvin Durham. “We was laying down such a barrage out there no one could tell.”
There were no guns among the refugees, the Korean survivors insisted. The record supports them: The regiment’s war diary included no such report, even though any weapons captured or enemy killed would have been the first for the newly arrived 7th Cavalry. In fact, the official diary mentioned nothing at all about the events at No Gun Ri, unless they were disguised in a line on July 26 about 2nd Battalion operations—“Mortar fire and patrols eliminated the threat of guerrilla activities from nearby villages”—or in another line on July 28, when the 1st Battalion reported that the enemy was “forcing mobs of civilians ahead of their troops into the line of fire.” Those entries, in a diary compiled after the events, were not further explained. Concluded one who was at No Gun Ri, career soldier George Preece, “It must have been covered up.” The regimental journal would have included minute-to-minute messages to and from No Gun Ri. But that communications log was the one that disappeared at some point.
During this three-day period, the North Korean enemy moved cautiously toward the 7th Cavalry line. Army intelligence reported the enemy front line was four miles up the road from No Gun Ri at midnight, July 26, according to declassified documents. By the third night of the trestle shootings, July 28, the North Koreans had only moved forward to within 2½ miles of No Gun Ri and the Americans, the intelligence reports said. North Korean documents captured later confirmed this slow movement, putting the advancing troops on the road two miles from No Gun Ri the night of July 28.
On the morning of Friday, July 28, 1st Cavalry Division headquarters showed impatience with the 7th Cavalry’s performance. The division chief of staff called regimental commander Col. Cecil Nist and ordered him to “get patrols out to your front and flank and contact the enemy and maintain this contact.” That night, however, the 7th Cavalry sent a written message back to headquarters: “No important contact has been reported by our 2nd Battalion.”
* * *
Chung Koo-hak, the eight-year-old no longer protected by big brother Koo-hun, floated in and out of consciousness. To the end, his cousin Koo-ok, the teacher, watched over the spindly, sickly boy. At one point, she put him on her back and headed out of the tunnel to try to escape, but was driven back by gunfire. For her, the end was not far off.
“My cousin and my mother and I sat together facing each other and put a blanket over us and huddled,” Koo-hak said. “I don’t remember how much time passed, but I suddenly felt something like hot water flowing down my face and then I lost consciousness.”
Later, Koo-hak said, “I remember seeing a village woman I could recognize sitting on the other side, leaning her back against the concrete wall. She seemed to have lost her mind. She didn’t move at all and her eyes were fixed on something far away. When she slowly adjusted her eyes to me, she said something about my face, something like, ‘Poor child, what happened to your face!’… When I struggled and managed to get up, I felt dizzy. I felt like I was a giant eight feet tall. The world seemed to swirl around me. I had to sit down. I crawled to the water but when I tried to drink water, it fell through my face and I could hardly drink at all.”
* * *
On Saturday, July 29, Harry Truman finally got away to the USS Williamsburg, the presidential yacht that had waited for him for many days, all polished teak and brass, at a Potomac River dock. The president boarded the sleek 244-footer for a bachelor weekend of river cruising, report reading and the usual poker games. Beforehand, Truman got his daily briefing on the war from Gen. Omar Bradley, the Joint Chiefs chairman. Nothing would surface later in the surviving record indicating the president was ever informed that the U.S. military, under orders, had begun attacking South Korean civilian refugees.
The hardworking Truman needed a rest. He’d hardly had a break since his fateful decision before dawn 29 days earlier to intervene with American troops in a war in far-off Korea. But his nemesis was not resting this weekend. Back home in Wisconsin, in a speech to 4,500 hunters and fishermen at a lakeside picnic, Sen. Joseph McCarthy delivered a slashing attack on Secretary of State Dean Acheson once again for helping “mastermind disaster for America and victory for communism in the East.”
The Truman administration must mobilize the world for an armed crusade, the Republican demanded, and he asked, “Why must the State Department insist that only the lives of American boys be used? Why cannot other peoples of the earth be used also to help create the necessary seawall of blood and flesh and steel to hold back the communist hordes?”
* * *
Heaps of dead now blocked the entrances to the No Gun Ri underpasses. Bodies spread out on the sandy tunnel floor. Others were strewn on the flats outside, on the path up to the rail embankment, on the tracks—swelling in the sun, food for insects, carrion for birds. Under the trestle, the energetic buzz of flies replaced the sound of cicadas on the hills.
The human wreckage of two villages lay there: Hae-sook’s and Hae-chan’s big brother and little brother, their pregnant aunt, their stubborn grandmother, Choon-ja’s mother and fallen grandfather, the baby “Great Success,” Hee-sook’s sister and parents and baby niece, Koo-hee and Koo-pil, his father’s pride, the baby Cho, born and died in the tunnel, the teacher Koo-ok who begged for everyone’s life, the girl Ke-soon who met Koo-hun’s eyes. All lay there, and many more.
Precise numbers would never be determined, but decades later survivors compiled a list of the names of some 200 dead or missing. They estimated that actually up to 400 were killed—100 in the strafing and 300 under and around the trestle. Possibly 200 escaped during the initial chaos or from the tunnels, they believed. On this Saturday, July 29, 1950, perhaps two dozen remained alive, silent, some unconscious, under those walls of blood and flesh.
* * *
The record shows the 7th cavalry pulled back in the early morning hours of July 29 even though the regiment and the rest of the 1st Cavalry Division were “under no immediate enemy pressure,” as the official Army history noted. That pressure would begin soon enough. The young Americans were moving on to trials of fire and sacrifice that many would not survive.
Along with their machine-gun tripods and entrenching tools, their ammo belts and C-rations, the green Garryowens, in their fifth day of war, took away from this place east of Yongdong their own lasting freeze frames, their own personalized nightmares. Ralph Bernotas, for example, remembered that after the mortars “splashed” the refugees, they were “a mass of white.… They all blended together, like newspaper on top of newspaper.” Pfc. Lyle Jacobson, from G Company, finally got a good look as the men climbed over the trestle embankment to head south. “There were quite a few slaughtered there.… But you didn’t know until you got down there and seen all the bodies at the mouth of the tunnel.”
Survivors said several GIs stopped in front and fired their rifles into the tunnels, emptying their clips into the still darkness. Later the first North Koreans, in their mustard-colored uniforms, moved warily up the road toward No Gun Ri, reaching the area just west of Hwanggan in early afternoon, according to U.S. intelligence. The smell of wholesale death drifted through the air.
* * *
Seventy miles to the south that day, another U.S. army unit was also withdrawing. The stranded 1st Battalion, 29th Infantry Regiment, was groping its way through the Chiri Mountains, pursued by an unseen North Korean division. Along the way, the hard-pressed Americans joined with hundreds of South Korean refugees, who guided them, who helped widen a mountain trail for their vehicles, who slept under their protection at night. Refugees and Americans alike finally crossed to the safety of a new defense line being formed around the Taegu-Pusan region.
At least 750,000 refugees had poured into this “Pusan Perimeter,” the southeastern quadrant of South Korea, perhaps half of them crowding into Taegu, the Eighth Army headquarters city. One among these milling, uprooted thousands was a slender, intense young law student, an ex–police lieutenant, who had found a sleeping space at the Taegu jail where his brother, a prison guard, was staying.
Chung Eun-yong had heard something barely coherent but frightening about No Gun Ri from a nephew, the teenager Chung Koo-shik, who had escaped and made his way south. Now Eun-yong couldn’t sleep. His mind raced. His guilt grew daily. He must find Sun-yong and the children. The young husband, the bridegroom who once placed so much hope in an easy morning’s passage from Shimchon to Chu Gok Ri, would soon be embarking on a long and almost hopeless journey, one that would last a lifetime.