South Korea Faces its Misdeeds in Vietnam: Some Thoughts from an American Journalist
Hankyoreh 21, April 2000
By Tim Shorrock
In Washington, D.C., just a stone’s throw from the famous Vietnam Memorial Wall, is a monument dedicated to the Americans who served in the Korean War.
Unlike the serene, almost reverential quality of the black wall that lists the names of the 50,000 Americans killed in combat in Vietnam, the Korean War Memorial is dominated by statues of heavily armed U.S. soldiers walking through a rice paddy. While the soldiers, black and white, look weary and sick of war, the image is aggressively militaristic; one can almost smell the napalm burning in the village they have just destroyed.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The original design for the Korean War memorial was a plaque of faces and scenes from Korea, picturing the sorrow and horror that characterized that terrible war. That plaque is still part of the exhibit, but has been relegated to the background. The human faces of war are completely overwhelmed by the metal statues of the soldiers, which stand bigger than life.
The scene of the soldiers was added to the memorial after an intensive lobbying campaign led by the late US. General Richard Stilwell, who once served as Commander of U.S. Forces in Korea and led CIA counter-insurgency forces during the Korean War. Stillwell spent the last years of his life trying to rectifiy American impressions of the Korean War and drumming up support for the Chun Doo Hwan military group that seized political power in 1979 and 1980.
After learning of the original, less politically charged design for the memorial, he organized veterans’ groups and conservative members ot Congress to lobby the Washington Parks Commission to transform the memorial from what would have been a quiet place of contemplation into its current glorification of U.S. military intervention.
Indeed, many prominent Americans see Korea as this country’s finest hour during the turbulent years of the Cold War. But their vision allows for no dissenting voices, no questions about the disastrous U.S. military occupation of South Korea from 1945 to 1948, no room to consider whether another path could have been taken to avoid the catastrophe that swept the Korean peninsula between 1950 and 1953.
I began to think of that memorial when I was asked to write an article for Hankyoreh about Koh Kyoung Tae’s beautifully written series about “The Secret Tragedy of Vietnam” – the brutality of the Korean mercenaries who fought under U.S. direction during the Vietnam War.
For years, as many Koreans know, the role of Korean soldiers in Vietnam was a taboo subject. During the height of the Vietnam War, Korean families who lost sons in combat were ordered never to talk about their loss, while returning veterans suffered their traumatic reentry into society in shame and fear. The history of South Korea’s entry into the war has been shrouded in secrecy, while the stories of Korean atrocities, widely known by Americans who served in Vietnam in both civilian and military capacities, didn’t emerge until recently.
In many ways, this historical amnesia is similar to the American experience in Korea. Even today, 50 years after President Truman ordered the massive U.S. military intervention in Korea and directed Japan, Korea’s former colonizer, to become a staging area and supplier for the war, the origins of the conflict and the horrors inflicted on Korean civilians by U.S. soldiers cannot be discussed objectively.
It is a matter of faith for most Americans, particularly those in high positions in the military and government, that Vietnam had its ambiguities - but the Korean War was nothing but a glorious chapter in the Cold War.
In recent months, that myth has been revived by Sen. John McCain, the former prisoner of war in Hanoi who just ended a campaign for the Republican nomination for president.
McCain spoke often on the stump about President Truman’s decision in 1950 to stop the North Korean invasion. He repeatedly used the racist term “gooks” to describe his Vietnamese captors in Hanoi – a word that was coined in Korea by US soldiers to describe all Koreans, whether they were soldiers or civilians (I heard the word “gooks” used repeatedly by young Americans living in Japan in the late 1960s – by then it was being applied to anybody from Asia).
McCain, who in 1984 advocated a U.S. attack on North Korea to end its nuclear program, also embraced the term 1950s term “rollback” in reference to what he calls “rogue regimes” in Iraq and North Korea. Without a thought for the millions of people who could die in such adventures, McCain said repeatedly he would adopt a similar policy today and arm rebel armies to topple governments in Bagdad and Pyongyang.
The Korean people would be wise to avoid this kind of glorification of South Korea’s role in Vietnam. Instead, they should use the opportunity of Hankyoreh’s reporting to understand how the Park Chung Hee military government allowed Korean soldiers to be hired by the United States to conduct an illegal and immoral war – and engage in operations that many Americans at the time were refusing to participate in.
One step on that path is to look closely at the ways that the Korean military mindset in Vietnam followed the American mindset in Korea.
It is startling to read in Ms. Koh’s report how Korean soldiers viewed Vietnam as “the war without a battleline,” where civilians couldn’t be distinguished from the enemy. “Korean soldiers had to face the hard reality that guns had to be pointed at civilians,” she writes. “Maybe the killings were inevitable.” Ironically, this is exactly what many American commentators say about the recent Associated Press series on the U.S killings of civilians in Korea.
But as historians familiar with Korean history and politics have reminded us, the spectacle of soldiers mixing with civilians and the inability of the Americans to distinguish friend from foe (or, worse, see everyone as foe) is a reflection on the nature of the war itself – which, as most Koreans know but few Americans grasp, was essentially a civil war that was transformed into a frontline battle in the Cold War by outside powers.
Yet Ms. Koh’s report, like the AP stories on the killings in 1950, also carry a ray of hope. She tells the story of a Korean soldier who tried to stop a massacre of civilians and returned to Vietnam to express his remorse at his inability to prevent the murders.
In recent years, similar stories have come to light of Americans who couldn’t stomach the crimes against humanity they saw in Vietnam and took action to stop the carnage. During the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, a US captain flew his helicopter into the village and pointed his gun at several US soldiers about to kill a group of children. The children were handed over to the captain, who flew them to safety. Similarly, the AP was able to find American witnesses to the civilian killings in Korea who told their story because they wanted to express their horror at what happened and atone for the crimes of their fellow soldiers.
But in terms of contemporary history, the most important lesson for Koreans is the relationship between the Korean action in Vietnam and the formation of the modern Korean military.
Park Chung Hee’s cooperation with President Lyndon Johnson was won by offering Park more control over his own army. That came about by giving the Korean military direct command of the Korean branch of the special forces, which were separated in the late 1970s from the Joint US-Korea Command wartime command structure (note: under this structure, a US general commands Korean troops in times of war - the only country in the world where a foreigner commands another country's army). Chun Doo Hwan himself emerged from the special forces and later used them with much brutality in Kwangju.
In the end, it is that legacy of a Korean army subordinate to the United States that still endures. Until it breaks free from that history and works with the United States to create a security relationship of equals, South Korea cannot escape the legacy of the Cold War that divided the peninsula and created untold agonies on both sides.
Tim Shorrock Silver Spring, Maryland March 29, 2000