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Remembering to Forget
Marilyn B. Young
A recent reference to human rights illustrates not only how widely the language of human rights has spread but also the range of rights claimed. After years of denial, a South Korean veteran confirmed accounts of atrocities committed against the Vietnamese by South Korean troops who fought with the United States during the Vietnam War.1 An official of the South Korean Ministry of Defense responded to the charge: "We must find out the truth in a more cautious manner because [the veteran's] remarks may brand all 300,000 Korean veterans of the Vietnam War as murderers, a label which would severely damage their honor and human rights." At the same time, human rights groups in Korea have been demanding that their government open its archives, apologize to the Vietnamese, and offer compensation to the victims.2
Ironically, it was as a consequence of exposing U.S. atrocities during the Korean War that South Korean massacres during the Vietnam War received publicity in Korea. In response to a series of Associated Press stories about the massacre at No Gun Ri, the South Korean government asked that Washington conduct a full-scale investigation. As a result, a previously ignored Korean scholar and freelance journalist, Koo Soo Jung, who had been studying the dismal South Korean record in Vietnam suddenly found a ready outlet for her work. Her findings were published in a South Korean magazine and then picked up by the Korean Broadcasting System, leading South Korean human rights groups to protest against the apparent double standard.3 The two stories move in different directions: in one, the language of human rights is used to defend the reputations of those who may have committed atrocities; in the other, attention to one past violation of human rights has led to the uncovering and discussion of tangentially related cases. But I am more interested in their common theme: how calling the public to remember atrocities seems to function timelessly, outside of history.
In Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye, Barbie Zelizer has argued that World War II Holocaust photographs came, over time, to stand for war atrocity as such. Indeed, contemporary photographs of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Cambodia consciously invoke familiar concentration camp images. "The recycling of photos from the past not only dulls our response to them," Zelizer argues, "but potentially undermines the immediacy and depth of our response to contemporary instances of brutality, discounting them as somehow already known to us."4 This is in part because the context in which atrocities are perceived is that of other atrocities, rather than that of the particular situation depicted. The original Holocaust photographs forced the viewer to bear witness; their successors have become a way of labeling, a superficial remembering serving a deeper forgetting. Zelizer's focus is the photography of atrocity, the visual evidence of its having taken place. Making people witness past horrors, she observes, "is becoming the acte imaginaire of the twentieth century." The overuse of visual representations of atrocities "may create a situation in which much of the public is content not to see-looking so as not to see, and remembering so as to forget."5 I am going to borrow this notion of remembering to forget to discuss the recent uncovering of a massacre committed by U.S. troops during the Korean War.
There were no photographs of the events at No Gun Ri, and in a sense there didn't have to be. They had been taken years later in Vietnam. The American public has grown accustomed to the notion that very bad things happened during the Vietnam War-though for the entire fifteen-year period, only one bad thing, My Lai, was accorded the label "atrocity." The war in Korea, which the U.S. public has had dif.culty knowing how to remember (and which historians designate "forgotten"), was thought of-when thought about at all-as a coda to World War II rather than a prologue to the war in Vietnam. It was a war more unpopular than the Vietnam War, but, unlike that one, its unpopularity was forgotten except by the politicians who drew from it a specific and limited lesson: avoid Chinese intervention.
In its aftermath, the received wisdom on the Korean War was that the country had appropriately responded to an aggressive Communist challenge-the entry of North Korean troops into South Korea. Things got a little murky later on in the war, after U.S. forces had driven the North Koreans back where they came from only to find themselves facing a new and more menacing enemy, the Chinese Communists. Finally, thanks to presidential candidate Dwight David Eisenhower's promise to go to Korea (what he did there is a little obscure), the war ended where it had begun-South Korea saved for the free world, North Korea properly chastised, the Chinese contained within their borders. Not quite a victory, perhaps, but not a defeat either, and as rapidly as could be, the war-which in the main was attended to only by Americans who had relatives fighting there-was .led away.
There were lingering issues-particularly the alleged collaboration of large numbers of U.S. prisoners of war with their captors-but few doubted the war's necessity. The only atrocities associated with it were attributed to North Korean and Chinese troops. This is not unusual. As one expert in military law put it: "Battle field war crimes committed by one's own forces are almost never charged as such. Instead, they are simply alleged as the Uniform Code of Military Justice offenses of murder, rape or aggravated assault .... They are denominated war crimes only if committed by enemy nationals."6 (No one at My Lai, for example, was charged with having committed a war crime.) And then suddenly one fall day in 1999, the New York Times published, on its front page, an Associated Press story about what had taken place under a railroad bridge in South Korea in July 1950.
I want to reflect on how people learn to forget by looking at the way in which what was quickly dubbed the "incident at No Gun Ri" was reported. All, except historians of the Korean War, were taken by surprise. Here was a massacre of noncombatants, testified to by those who had participated in it. Korean refugees, strafed by U.S. planes as they fled the fighting, were herded under a railroad bridge by U.S. soldiers and then .red upon-in some accounts over a three-day period- as they huddled there. The number of dead remains in dispute, though it is likely to have been several hundred and perhaps as many as four hundred. It seemed initially impossible to assimilate, a story slipped into the wrong war.
News stories of what happened under the bridge incorporated a set of extenuating circumstances. First, the civilians had given cause, since North Korean soldiers were known to infiltrate refugee columns in order to get behind U.S. lines. Second, the soldiers themselves did not really represent the U.S. military-they were soft, untrained troops suddenly catapulted into combat from comfortable occupation duty in Japan. Third, the circumstances were particularly fraught: U.S. troops were in chaotic retreat; confusion reigned; there was danger of being wiped out entirely. The Los Angeles Times elaborated: the troops at No Gun Ri were equipped with old World War II ordinance; they relied on old Rand McNally maps; the troops were in retreat, were unaccustomed to nighttime operations, had lost weapons and men, were struggling "against oppressive heat, rugged terrain and inadequate supplies of water, as well as pursuing North Korean units." They were, military historian Allan R. Millett reflected, "all scared to death.... Add to that anxiety, ignorance, horror stories of atrocities committed by the North Koreans and you have troops in a condition not to exercise very good judgment."7 The relationship between these factors and the mass death under the railroad bridge is left implicit. Some accounts offered the circumstances first and only then turned to the events themselves; others reversed the order. But none made any effort to restrict the discussion to the decision of senior officers to stop refugees attempting to cross U.S. lines by any means necessary, and only one raised the problem that distinctions between "friend and foe" were difficult to make in Korea, as they were to be again in Vietnam.
I have found especially useful to an examination of the manner in which No Gun Ri was considered, so that it could be (like the Korean War itself) simultaneously noted and forgotten, an account of the incident written by James Webb, Vietnam veteran, novelist, and former secretary of the navy.8 This short essay provides a model of the way remembering can become simultaneous with forgetting. This is Webb's opening sentence: "I do not know what happened to the civilians at the bridge near the village of No Gun Ri, although it seems clear from recent AP reports that many of them died in the early days of the Korean War as their country was being ripped apart by a communist invasion and the U.S. Army was thrown into disarray." In this economical beginning, Webb sets the terms: probably civilians died, but in the mitigating context of enemy invasion and U.S. helplessness.