armstrong, charles 2001 america's korea, korea's vietnam

7/27/2019 Armstrong, Charles 2001 America's Korea, Korea's Vietnam

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AMERICAS KOREA,

KOREAS VIETNAM

Charles K . Armstrong

Atrocities committed by American soldiers against Vietnamese civilians during theVietnam War have once again become an issue of public debate in the United States,yet simila r actions by South Korean troops fighting America s war in Vietnam remainvirtually unknown in the West. The Republic of Korea (ROK) dispatched more than300,00 0 combat troops to Vietnam between 1965 and 1973 , but after decades of en-forced silence by successive authoritarian governments, Koreans have only recentlybegun to grapple with the ambiguous legacy of the Vietnam War for South Korea. In

the spring and summer of 2000, testimonies in the South Korean media by Koreanveterans of the Vietnam War revealed for the first time detailed, extensive accountsof Korean atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. These revelations, and the contro-

versy they triggered within South Korea, bring into bold relief the role of Koreans inAmericas Vietnam War and the role of the Vietnam War in the political and economicdevelopment of South Korea.

We cannot sit idly by and assume the attitude of onlooker

while our ally falls prey to Communist aggression

as if it were a blazing fire on the other bank of the river.

President Park Chung Hee, 9 February 1965

We must fight the enemy in Vietnam as we do in Korea.

Our efforts must be directed toward the extermination

of the Communists, reestablishment of peace,

and reconstruction of Vietnam.

Lt. General Lee Sae-Ho, commander,

Republic of Korea Forces in Vietnam, 1 May 1966

Critical Asian Studies

33: 4 ( 2001) , 527-539

ISSN 1467-2715 print / 1472-6033 online / 04 / 000527-13 2001 BCAS, Inc.


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Before it was even halfway over, 2001 turned out to be a remarkable year for re-

viving repressed memories of Americas wars in East Asia. In January, the Penta-

gon concluded its fifteen-month investigation of the alleged massacre of Korean

civilians near Nog5n-ri (Nog5n village) in July 1950.1Although the Pentagon re-

port concluded that the U.S. military did not bear ultimate responsibility for the

massacre a conclusion that was less than satisfying to many, not least the sur-vivors of the Nog5n-ri killings and the victims families2 still the army was

forced for the first time since the war ended in 1953 to admit that in the early

stages of the war significant numbers of Korean civilians were killed or injured

by U.S. forces in the vicinity of Nog5n-ri. The Korean War, in other words, was

beginning to resemble what the Vietnam War would be in a later period. Then,

in April 2001, the New York Times Sunday Magazine carried a cover story about

an alleged massacre of Vietnamese civilians by a Navy Seals team led by former

U.S. senator Bob Kerrey, in 1969.3Along with a television interview with Kerrey

and other members of his platoon on the 60 Minutes news program, the

newspaper story touched off a stream of commentaries in the U.S. media, the

likes of which have not been seen in many years, over the nature of, and the

blame to be apportioned for, Americas conduct in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, in a development virtually unmentioned in the Western press,

South Korea has been facing oddly parallel revelations of its own. In fact, Kore-

ans have been closely following the investigation of the Nog5

n-ri massacre. Ko-reas Ministry of National Defense (MND) has undertaken its own investigation

of Nog5n-ri in cooperation with the Pentagon team (and is reaching identical

528 Critical Asian Studies33: 4 (2001 )

Between 1965 and 1973 the Republic of Korea (ROK) contributed a cumulative total ofmore than 300,000 combat troops to the American war effort. ROK troops on parade inVietnam, 1968. (Source: The ROK Army in Vietnam: Six Years of Peace and Construction, Seoul)


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conclusions).4 But while this has been going on, South Korean media have for

the first time reported detailed, eyewitness accounts of atrocities against Viet-

namese civilians committed by South Korean soldiers fighting Americas war in

Vietnam in the late 1960s. If the alleged massacre of civil ians at Nog5n-ri made

the Korean War seem more like the Vietnam War than many Americans would

otherwise have believed, South Korea has now begun to grapple with its ownlong-suppressed memories of Vietnam. These revelations are largely the result

of reporting done by the progressive South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh

Sinmun.

Hankyoreh Sinmun was born amid the democratic struggles against South

Koreas military regime in the 1980s as a critical and much-persecuted under-

ground alternative to the government-controlled mass media. With the opening

up of South Koreas media in the aftermath of General Chun Doo Hwans fall

from power in 1987, Hankyoreh Sinmuns circulation increased till the daily

newspaper became the fourth largest in the country. Along with its sister weekly,

Hankyoreh 21, the daily newspaper has been a consistent voice for democrati-

zation and an unsparing critic of authoritarian government and the big-business

conglomerates, orchaebol. Last spring, Hankyoreh Sinmun and Hankyoreh 21

began an exclusive investigation of atrocities by Republic of Korea (ROK) mili-

tary in Vietnam, a subject widely known in South Korean society but one whose

details had long been denied or suppressed by successive ROK governments.The most sensational and extensively detailed report was based on the testi-

mony of retired colonel Kim Ki-tae, former commander of the Seventh Com-

pany, Second Battalion, of the elite ROK Blue Dragon Marine Brigade. Now in

his early sixties, Kim testified to Hankyoreh in April 2000 that as a thirty-

one-year-old lieutenant he had overseen the brutal murder of twenty-nine un-

armed Vietnamese youth in Quang Ngai Province on 14 November 1966 .5 His

story turned out to be the tip of the iceberg; subsequent testimony by South Ko-

rean veterans revealed in graphic detail the horrors, still largely unknown in theWest, of Koreas participation in Americas war in Vietnam.

Kim Ki-tae testified that from 9 to 27 November 1966, the First, Second, and

Third Battalions of the Blue Dragon Marine Brigade carried out Operation

Dragon Eye, a campaign to mop up Viet Cong (VC) resistance in their area of

operations in central Vietnam. On 10 November, the Sixth Company of the Sec-

ond Battalion came under fire near the vil lage of An Tuyet, although they suf-

fered no casualties. Four days later, with memories of this attack fresh in their

minds, the Seventh Company came upon twenty-nine Vietnamese men in a rice

field. The Koreans arrested the men as suspected VC guerrillas and tied them to-

gether by the wrists as they searched for weapons. Finding no weapons in the vi-

cinity, the Korean troops were left with the choice of releasing the prisoners or

handing them over to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). This was the

last day of the first stage of Operation Dragon Eye. On 15 November the ROK

forces involved in the operation were supposed to hand over control of the area

to the South Vietnamese Army, which the Koreans held in low regard. Releasingsuspected VC to ARVN was tantamount to aiding the enemy, as far as many of the

Korean soldiers were concerned. They felt that there was a high probability that

Armstrong/Amer icas K orea, K oreas Vietnam 529


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the men would escape, regroup, and cause more trouble. The Koreans were ex-

hausted from six days of jungle fighting, their uniforms torn, faces painted black

with camouflage, and Operation Dragon Eye had yet to show any significant re-

cord of VC casualties. What do we do with these bastards? a platoon com-

mander asked Kim.

Drag them over there! was Kims answer. The Vietnamese men, still boundtogether by rope, were thrown into a bomb crater that had been left by an Amer-

ican F4 fighter attack. The hole measured some 8 meters wide by 4 meters deep.

The Koreans stepped back and threw grenades into the crater, splattering blood

and flesh into the air. When they were finished, moans of the living could still be

heard emerging from the hole. The Koreans shouldered their rifles and fired

into the crater, ensuring that all were dead.

As company commander the highest-ranking field officer among the Ko-

rean troops in Vietnam Kim was acutely aware of his direct responsibil ity for

the action he recounted. As he told the Hankyoreh Sinmun, Tens of people

lived or died according to my orders. If I said, Release them! Dont kill them!

they would live, but if I said, Hey, you sons of bitches, why are you crawling

around? they would be taken off and kil led. Those twenty-nine were the same.

But now that I think about it, they were just farmers. Still, as Kim explained, in

words strikingly reminiscent of American testimonies about Nog5n-ri and the

American war in Vietnam itself, Vietnam was a guerrilla war. We couldnt dis-criminate between VC and non-VC. Civilians were aiding VC in VC villages, hit-

ting us on the back of the head. Kim also revealed that a month earlier, on 9 Oc-

tober 1966, most of the population of Binh Tai vil lage in the Phuoc Binh district

sixty-eight men, women, and children were massacred by ROK troops,

who set fire to the vil lagers homes and shot them when they fled the burning

buildings. In unified Vietnam, there is now a monument in Phuoc Binh to the ci-

vilians massacred by the South Koreans.

If the Korean War is a forgotten war in the United States, the Vietnam War isa forgotten, even forcibly suppressed, experience in South Korea. For Ameri-

cans, the massive participation of South Korean troops in the U.S. war effort in

Vietnam is a doubly forgotten event. Few Americans are even aware that Korea

had its, or rather our, Vietnam. The legacies of the Vietnam War for South Ko-

reans sound quite familiar to Americans, including post-traumatic stress syn-

drome, thousands of half-Vietnamese children fathered and abandoned by Ko-

rean soldiers and civilians, and the horrific effects of Agent Orange, for which

ROK veterans have been trying since 1994, so far unsuccessfully, to sue the U.S.

government and the chemical manufacturers for compensation. But while in

the United States the Vietnam War triggered open and sometimes violent de-

bate, debate on the Vietnam War in South Korea was silenced by the successive

military regimes and has only become a matter of limited public discussion in

the last ten years. This silence was partly the result of the South Korean govern-

ments attempt to suppress anything that might upset ROK-U.S. relations, partly

due to sensitivity over South Koreas financial gain from the war, and partly a re-flection of embarrassment about being on the losing side especially after

years of glowing propaganda during the Vietnam War itself about the rightness



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of Koreas participation in it and the

cooperative spirit between the Ko-

rean forces and the South Vietnam-

ese people.

When the ROK sent its expedi-

tionary forces to Vietnam in the late1960s, the action was portrayed in

the South Korean media as a noble

defense of freedom against commu-

nist aggression, welcomed by the

South Vietnamese.6 Strict media cen-

sorship in the ROK until the late

1980s ensured that this interpreta-

tion of Koreas Vietnam War experi-

ence would hold. Even in the war

memorial established in Seoul in

1994, the display on ROK forces in

Vietnam adheres to this relentlessly

positive representation of South Ko-

reas Vietnam venture. As recently as

May 1995 , then South Korean minis-ter of education Kim Suk-hui was re-

moved from her post for referring to

the Korean War as a civil war and to

South Korean soldiers in Vietnam as

mercenaries. Only in the 1990s did

public discussion about the ambigu-

ous legacy of Koreas V ietnam

emerge in South Korea. The growingpopular consciousness of the war is

evident in the form of novels, films,

and a slow trickle of information

from the mass media and a reluctant Ministry of National Defense.

Amid this wave of information and debate about Koreas Vietnam, the com-

plexity and significance of the Vietnam War for the Republic of Korea has come

to light in an unprecedented degree, and the connection between Vietnam and

Koreas political and economic development is becoming increasingly clear.

The common understanding, particularly in the United States, of the Vietnam

War in terms of the global cold war or U.S.-Vietnamese relations, has tended to

obfuscate the significance of Vietnam within the East Asian region. Perhaps

most importantly for South Korea, the Vietnam War is responsible, in no small

measure, for the Korean economic miracle of the 1960s to the 1990s.

Between 1965 and 1973 the Republic of Korea contributed a cumulative total

of more than 300,000 combat troops to the American war effort, second only tothe United States itself and far exceeding all other Allied contributions com-

bined. At its peak in 1967, the ROK troop presence in Vietnam was just over


Disabled Vietnamese survivor of an attack byROK troops that killed forty in her village in1966. (Credit: Hankyoreh 21, 27 April 2000)


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50,000. 7According to official South Korean statistics, not released until 1991,

4,687 ROK soldiers were killed and some 8,000 wounded in the Vietnam War.8

South Korean President Park Chung Hees decision to commit ROK combat

troops to assist the Americans in Vietnam in the mid-1960s was not without pre-

cedent. As early as January 1954, the South Korean government under Syngman

Rhee volunteered, through a communication with the U.S. ambassador to theROK, to send a combat division to relieve the French in Vietnam and Laos.9 The

Eisenhower administration turned down Rhees unsolicited offer, in part be-

cause of fear of provoking China and North Korea at a time when the ROK itself

was thought by the Americans to be unstable and militarily vulnerable. How-

ever, after General Parks coup in 1961 and the establishment of a more stable

military government in 1963, coinciding with the escalation of the U.S. pres-

ence in Vietnam, the perception of the American planners changed. Despite

criticism by opposition politicians and the domestic media, Park again volun-

teered South Korean troops to fight for the Americans in Vietnam, and this time

the Americans agreed. ROK involvement began in September 1964 with a con-

tingent of some one hundred and thirty members of a Mobile Army Surgical

Hospital (MASH) and a group of ten Taekwondo instructors; thirteen months

later, South Korea sent its first full division of combat troops to Vietnam, consist-

ing of fifteen thousand members of the Capital (Fierce Tiger) Division and five

thousand members of the Blue Dragon Marine Division.

10

ROK assistance to the U.S. effort was based in part on political reciprocity: the

Johnson administration under its More Flags campaign sought to international ize


Korean National Cemetery, Seoul. Kim Ki-tae, former commander of the Seventh Com-

pany, Second Battalion, of the elite ROK Blue Dragon Marine Brigade, bows before thegrave headstone of a fellow ROK soldier who was killed in Vietnam. Kim revealed thehorrible acts committed by his troops in Vietnam. (Credit: Hankyoreh 21, 27 April 2000)


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the war, giving the war the appearance of an allied effort rather than a unilateral

U.S. action. In exchange, Park Chung Hee won renewed U.S. backing for his un-

popular dictatorship and a continued American troop commitment. But the pri-

mary motivation for ROK participation, and perhaps its greatest long-term ben-

efit to South Korea, was economic.

Vietnam was a goldmine for South Korea. A decade earlier, Japanese primeminister Yoshida Shigeru had called the Korean War a gift from the gods for

stimulating economic development in postwar Japan; without the Korean War,

it is unlikely that the U.S. occupation would have ended as early as it did or that

the Japanese economy would have taken off as dramatically. Similarly, the Viet-

nam War spurred the South Korean economy and helped sustain the Park dicta-

torship. South Koreas economic takeoff in the mid-1960s would not have been

possible without the profits gained by fighting for the United States in Vietnam.

War-related income in the form of direct aid, military assistance, procurements,

and soldiers salaries amounted to over $1 bill ion. In 1967 alone war-related in-

come accounted for nearly 4 percent of South Koreas GNP and 20 percent of its

foreign exchange earnings. In particular, South Koreas emergent heavy-indus-

try sector steel, transportation equipment, chemical exports, and the like

was given an enormous and invaluable boost by the Vietnam War.11 Major South

Korean companies that took off during the war are now household names, in-

cluding Hyundai, Daewoo, and Hanjin, the parent company of Korean Airlines.Parks first five-year plan for Korean economic development was mapped out

with Vietnam in mind; the war, for example, largely paid for the construction of

South Koreas first expressway, the Seoul-Pusan highway, built between 1968

and 1970.12

As is well known by observers of and participants in the Vietnam War, ROK

soldiers in Vietnam gained a reputation for harsh, ferocious, even brutal behav-

ior. This fact was not lost on the American force commanders, who could criti-

cize ROK behavior while acknowledging its usefulness. For example, U.S. forcescommander General Creighton Abrams, comparing the Allied war effort to an

orchestra, once said that the Koreans play only one instrument the bass

drum.13 The ROK area of operations extended along the coast from Cam Ranh

Bay in the south to Qui Nhon in the north, and the ROKs (pronounced Rocks)

were viewed with a measure of respect and even fear by the Americans, who

rarely mingled with the Korean troops but were happy to send them to take care

of the tougher tasks of pacification. ROK officers in Vietnam included future

presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, and it was soldiers hardened by

combat in Vietnam who led the bloody suppression of the Kwangju uprising in

South Korea in May 1980, as General Chun consolidated his grip on power.

Evidence about the brutality of ROK troops in Vietnam remains largely anec-

dotal, and there has been until now no systematic investigation of atrocity

claims in Korea. The Hankyoreh Sinmun series of articles on the Vietnam War

was not only the first large-scale journalistic treatment of the subject in Korea,

but also the first Korean attempt to corroborate stories of ROK atrocitiesthrough investigation in Vietnam itself. Kim Ki-taes story of sixty-eight civilians

killed by South Korean soldiers in October 1966, for example, was confirmed by



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a Hankyoreh Sinmun investigation in Phuoc Binh. But even as anecdotes, many

of the atrocity stories show considerable and revealing consistency. For exam-

ple, an oft-told story is that ROK soldiers regularly cut off ears and/or noses of

VC to keep a record of the number of enemy killed; ear-cutting scenes occur no

less than four times in the film version of Ahn Jung-hyos Vietnam War novel

White Badge. Kim Ki-tae, in his testimony to Hankyoreh Sinmun, confirms thatthe Koreans took the noses and ears of VC victims home as souvenirs. Although

this was apparently sometimes done by Americans in Vietnam as well, system-

atic slicing of ears and noses is strikingly reminiscent of the Japanese practice of

removing the ears of Korean victims during the Hideyoshi invasions of the

1590s. A mound of what are said to be Korean ears from these invasions remains

a tourist attraction near Kyoto, called the Grave of Ears (Mimizuka). There is

no evidence that Korean soldiers were deliberately mimicking this ancient Japa-

nese practice something that would have been richly ironic given the history

of Korean-Japanese relations but Hideyoshis record of atrocities in Korea

was an established part of every ROK citizens history education. Other reports

claim that ROK soldiers removed the hearts of living victims, or flayed entire

skins from killed VC to hang on the trees as warnings. While much research is

needed to confirm the extent and nature of Korean atrocities in Vietnam, the

ROK reputation for ferocity in the war is simply too well established and too

often repeated by Korean, Vietnamese, and American witnesses to bedismissed.

This ferocity may be explained by several factors: the experience of the Ko-

rean War and the nature of ROK military training that shaped the Korean sol-

diers; the legacy of Japanese wartime imperialism; and the ambiguous racial

one might even say semi-colonial position of the Korean soldiers placed be-

tween the Americans and the Vietnamese. First, the brutality of South Korean

troops in Vietnam was indirectly a product of the brutality of the Korean War,

which killed upwards of 2 mill ion Koreans. Many of the Korean civilian deathswere the result of U.S. bombing, and not a few atrocities were committed by the

North Koreans and the Chinese. But the newly formed ROK Army seems to have

been particularly indiscriminate, and civilian casualties racked up by ROK

troops during the three-month UN-U.S.-South Korean occupation of North Ko-

rea (September-December 1950) probably number in the hundreds of thou-

sands.14 Most of the ROKs in Vietnam had been young boys during the Korean

War and had seen at close range the inhumanity of that civil conflict. Educated

all their lives to consider Reds as less than human, such men were well-suited

for an anticommunist campaign of violence. The training of ROK frontline sol-

diers, partly because of the South Korean militarys roots in the Japanese mili-

tary, was and to some extent remains particularly harsh. Until recently all

able-bodied South Korean men, with very few exceptions, were required to

serve in the military for nearly three years, and basic training was a fearsome or-

deal that could sometimes be fatal. It is not difficult to imagine these young sol-

diers, in the confusing conditions of war far from their homeland, few able tospeak French or English (much less Vietnamese), losing their sense of discrimi-

nation and control in combat.



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A second, related reason for the Korean soldiers fierceness was the legacy of

Japanese colonial rule and wartime mobilization. As historian Han Hong-koo

pointed out in an editorial in Hankyoreh 21, the ROK army was directly de-

scended from the Japanese military and its officers included Park Chung Hee, a

veteran of Japans anticommunist counterinsurgency campaigns in Manchuria

in the 1930s.15

And, like Park and other Koreans who fought for the Japanese intheir semicolony of Manchukuo, Koreans in Vietnam were fighting a war that

was not their own. They had no long-term commitment to Vietnam and had less

to lose than the main occupying power; the Korean soldiers were there to get

the job done.16 Furthermore, Japanese counterinsurgency was, even as such

campaigns go, a particularly harsh and unforgiving type of warfare.17 By 1940

the Japanese had succeeded in brutally pacifying most of Manchuria, but cer-

tainly did not gain much love from the local population in the process. Much

more than the Americans, the Korean officers who had come of age in the Man-

churian antiguerrilla wars were aware of the brutal nature of successful

counterinsurgency.

Finally, the Korean behavior can also be explained by the difficult interstitial

position of Koreans in a war with such glaring racial divides. The racist aspects

of the American War in Vietnam are well known and do not need to be repeated

here; the Koreans looked like the enemy and therefore had to doubly prove

themselves as effective fighters in the eyes of the Americans. And, again as theyhad in the Japanese empire, the Koreans occupied a position that could be

somewhat elevated in the ethnic scheme of things. Just as Koreans in Manchuria

were often seen by the Japanese as superior to the local Chinese but inferior to

their Japanese masters in the 1930s, so Koreans could become more than

gook, if not quite white, in the eyes of the Americans in Vietnam.18 The nov-

elist Hwang Suk-young, a veteran of the ROK Blue Dragon Marines in Vietnam,

illustrates this point in his autobiographical novel Shadow of Arms.As an Ameri-

can criminal investigation officer and his Korean counterpart drive through thestreets of Da Nang, they carry on the following dialogue:

Youre a Korean, arent you? Your girls are also nice. There were two Ko-

rean girls in the strip show at the club last night. Both of them looked ex-

actly like American women.

You mean an American army club?

Yes, but Koreans can go there if theyre working for investigation head-

quarters. No gooks, though.

Who are gooks?

Vietnamese. Theyre really filthy. But youre like us. Were the allies.19

The irony, of course, is that the term gook itself was the most widely used

American pejorative for Koreans in the Korean War (although the term did not

originate at that time, as is often assumed; the term was probably coined during

the U.S. war in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century). Fighting the

Americans war, the Koreans found themselves in the position of the Western

power in Asia, and they could see the natives from the Americans perspective a situation not unlike what Frantz Fanon described for the colonized black in

Africa: as black skin, white masks.20 Perhaps we can call this in the East Asian



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context yellow skin, white masks: the Koreans ambiguous and unstable posi-

tion between the colonizer (the Americans) and the colonized (the Viet-

namese) encouraged an attitude toward the Vietnamese that could be even

more condescending and dehumanizing than that of the Americans themselves.

This helps to explain both the brutality of Korean forces toward the Viet Cong

and the disdain they felt toward the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.After Kim Ki-taes testimony was published in April 2000, several more Viet-

nam vets told Hankyoreh Sinmun about atrocities they had witnessed or partic-

ipated in. One officer described an ROK massacre in Phung Nhi, Quang Nam

Province, in February 1968, as a second My Lai (although it occurred one

month before Americas My Lai massacre) and said it also reminded him of

Nog5n-ri.21 These public, detailed accounts of atrocities have brought the dis-

cussion of the Vietnam War to a new level of awareness in South Korea. Al-

though discussion of South Korean soldiers in Vietnam had been emerging in

fiction and film since the early 1990s,22Hankyoreh Sinmunwas the first to bring

to light eyewitness accounts of atrocities. Some of the other media in South Ko-

rea over the past year-and-a-half have followed suit with their own published

stories of Korean brutality in the Vietnam War.23

The mainstream South Korean media has had little to say about Hankyoreh

Sinmuns stories, and official circles have strongly suggested that this sordid his-

tory should be kept quiet. (As one MND General said to Hankyoreh Sinmun,Why bring this up after 30 years?) The Ministry of National Defense denies any

knowledge of the massacre, while one high-ranking ROK military official ex-

cused any such actions by ROK troops by saying that they could not differenti-

ate innocent civilians from Viet Congs.24 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and

Trade (MOFAT), meanwhile, has said that such revelations could damage warm-

ing economic and political relations between the ROK and socialist Vietnam,

and they would not be good for the 5,500 Korean compatriots living in Viet-

nam.25

MOFAT also cautioned that if accusations that our troops committedatrocities in the Vietnam War are made repeatedly, Seouls bargaining power in

the Nog5n-ri talks with the U.S. will be weakened significantly.26According to

this view, South Korean atrocities in Vietnam somehow cancel out American

atrocities in Korea.

The Hankyoreh Sinmun investigation did finally get a powerful public re-

sponse, however, when an irate group of friends of the Korean military de-

scended on the newspapers offices in Seoul on 27 June 2000. Several hundred

members of the ROK War Veterans Association, dressed in combat fatigues,

began a demonstration in front ofHankyoreh Sinmuns headquarters in the

early afternoon. By 4:00 P.M., the mob was chanting angry slogans and throwing

rocks at the newspaper offices windows. Shortly before 5:00 P.M., the group

stormed the building, trashing offices, destroying computers and printing

equipment, and injuring several workers. In the process the demonstrators also

smashed twenty-one cars that happened to be parked in the neighbourhood.27

Other than the Hankyoreh Sinmun itself, not a single Korean newspaper re-ported the incident.



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The ROK government, eager to cooperate with the United States in the inves-

tigation of Nog5n-ri, has yet to make any attempt to look into the actions of its

own troops in Vietnam. For its part, the Vietnamese government while forth-

coming with information forHankyoreh Sinmuns reporters, has not sought to

make a public issue of this history with the ROK government. Economic consid-

erations are undoubtedly an important factor here also. By the late 1990s,South Korea was Vietnams fourth-largest trading partner and fifth-largest for-

eign investor, behind Japan and ahead of the United States. The now-flounder-

ing Daewoo conglomerate, always eager to exploit emerging markets, built a

five-star hotel in Hanoi and has become the single-largest corporate investor in

Vietnam. When President Kim Dae Jung visited Vietnam for the Association of

Southeast Asian Nations summit in December 1998, he alluded to the war as an

unfortunate period in the past and said that the two countries should build

forward-looking relations.28 But the past remains a painful memory for both

sides. Vietnamese survivors of South Korean atrocities have told their own

hair-raising stories to the Hankyoreh Sinmun. Most ROK Vietnam vets continue

to be marginalized and remain almost invisible in South Korean society. The es-

timated seven thousand Korean victims of Agent Orange were not included in

the 1984 class-action suit that gave compensation to victims from the United

States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (and were certainly not encouraged

to join the suit by then-president and Vietnam veteran Chun Doo Hwan).

29

Abandoned Vietnamese children of Korean fathers, though not suffering the

same racial stigma as Amerasians fathered by American soldiers, are equally a

tragic legacy of the war. Despite decades of forced amnesia in Korea, the truth of

Koreas Vietnam has begun to emerge into the light, revealing yet another dis-

turbing layer of the history of Americas wars in Asia. This heretofore hidden his-

tory reminds us that Americas Vietnam War, as unique and extraordinary as its

tragic impact has been, is only one part of an East Asian regional conflict that

lasted three decades, from the 1940s to the 1970s, and involved a score of gov-ernments, millions of civilians, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers from

across the region. Many details of this thirty-years war have yet to be uncovered,

but taken as whole this conflict has left behind a salient political and economic

legacy for todays East Asia, as well a host of difficult memories on both sides of

the Pacific that have yet to be resolved.

Notes1 For the full text of the Pentagon report online, see http://www.army/mil/nogunri.

2. Responding to President Clintons expression of regret for the incident andthe U.S. governments offer to pay for a monument to the victims, some of theKorean survivors responded, We dont need the scholarship and monu-ment.We want a more sincere apology, not a vague statement of regret, fromthe U.S. government. New York Times, 6 December 2000, A1.

3. Gregory L. Vistica, What Happened in Thanh Phong, The New York Times

Magazine, 29 April 2001.4. Korea Update (Seoul), January 2001, 1.



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5. Hankyoreh Sinmun, 19 April 2000, 1; Hankyoreh 21, 27 April 2000, 34-37.6. In fact, the decision to send ROK troops to Vietnam was worked out solely be-

tween the United States and South Korea, without consulting the Republic ofVietnam governmen t in the matter. Tae Yang Kwak, The Vietnam War and Ko-rean National Development, M.A. thesis (Harvard University, 1999), 26-27,based on memoranda between William P. Bundy and President Lyndon B. John-

son, archived in the Johnson Library.7. Robert M. Blackburn, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnsons More Flags: The

Hiring of Korean, Filipino and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War(Jefferson,N.C.: McFarland and Co., 1994), 158. The second-largest non-U.S. foreign com-bat force in Vietnam was the Australian contingent, which peaked at 11,586 in1970 less than one-quarter the number of South Koreans that same year. ROKgovernment figures give the number of total troops deployed as 312,85 3 overthe eight-year period of South Korean combat activity in Vietnam. In addition,some 16,000 South Korean civilians were employed in Vietnam during the war.

8. Cited in Ahn Junghyo, A Double Exposure of the War, in Americas Wars inAsia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory, ed. Philip West, Stephen I.Levine, and Jackie Hiltz (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 166. Given thelarge number of ROK troops in Vietnam and the dangerous field positions theyoccupied, this casualty figure seems suspiciously low. Nevertheless, this re-mains the official ROK record of casualties. According to South Korean MNDstatistics as well, some 41,000 VC were killed by ROK troops, but this figure isalso difficult if not impossible to verify.

9. Dong-Ju Choi, The Political Economy of Koreas Involvement in the Second

Indo-China War, Ph.D. diss. (University of London, 1995) , 90; cited in Kwak,Vietnam War, 9-10.10. Kwak, Vietnam War, 19-20. Considering that almost an entire generation of

American s were familiar with Korea primarily through the televisio n showM.A.S.H., ostensibly set in the Korean War but really about the Vietnam War, itmay seem appropriate that the Koreans first direct involvement with the Viet-nam War would be through a MASH unit. The Capital Division would later, un-der the command of General Roh Tae Woo, play a pivotal role in the 1979 ChunDoo Hwan coup, and Roh would succeed Chun as ROK president in 1988 .

11. Jung-en Woo notes that, even though exports to Vietnam in the late 1960smade up only 3.5 percent of South Koreas total exports, Vietnam took in 94.29percent of ROK steel exports, 51.75 percent of its transportation equipment,40.77 percent of its non-electric machinery, and 40.87 percent of its chemicalexports. See Jung-en Woo, Race to the Swif t: State and Finance in Korean In-

dustrialization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 94-86 . WithoutVietnam as a largely captive market for such goods in the 1960s, it is highly un-likely that South Korea could have become so successful in these sectors in the1970s and 1980s.

12. John Lie, Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1998), 64.13. Quoted in Harry G. Summers Jr., Historical Atlas of the Vietnam War(Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 154.14. Callum MacDonald, So Terrible a Liberation: The UN Occupation of North

Korea, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 23, no. 2 (April-June 1991): 5-10;Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, The Roaring of the Cata-ract(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 673-80 .

15. Han Hong-koo, Massacre Breeds Massacre, Hankyoreh 21, 4 May 2000, 26.

16. During World War II, Korean soldiers in the Japanese wartime empire had areputation for harshness not unlike that of the ROKs in Vietnam. Korean POWguards in Southeast Asia, for example, were particularly well known for their



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brutality as were Korean police in Manchuria. See Bruce Cumings, KoreasPlace in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), 178.

17. It certainly appears that U.S. military planners were looking at the Japanesesuccess in counterinsurgency to learn lessons for Vietnam. See Chong-SikLee, Counterinsurgency in Manchuria: The Japanese Experience, 1931-194 0(Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1967), a translation of Japanese counterin-

surgency documents commissioned by RAND at the height of the Vietnam War.The documents include lengthy descriptions of the Japanese militarys exten-sive practice of relocating farmers to collective hamlets (shudan buraku),

with obviou s parallels to the strategic hamlet policy of the United States inVietnam.

18. Just as the ROK forces who fought in Vietnam have been largely forgotten in theUnited States, so too the hundreds of thousands of Korean colonial subjects

who fought in the Japanese Imperial Army have been almost completely forgot-ten in Japan.

19. Hwang Suk-young, Shadow of Arms, trans. Chun Kyung-ja (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-nell University, East Asia Program, 1994), 25. This suggests another aspect ofthe Korean presence in Vietnam that is widely known anecdotally but has neverbeen investigated empirically, namely, the apparently large number of enter-tainment women as well as the men who worked with and employed them

brought from South Korea to service both Koreans and Americans.20. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).21. Hankyoreh Sinmun, 4 May 2000, 20.22. Perhaps the best-known account in the English language is Ahn Junghyos

novel White Badge (New York: Soho Press, 1989), which was made into a film ofthe same name in 1992. Interestingly, theKorean title of both thenovel and filmtranslates as White War, with obvious racial implications, but the author him-self chose to translate it differently.

23. For example, in early 2001 the journal Korea Report 21, published by the Ko-rean House for International Solidarity, produced a collection of articles on Ko-rean massacres of Vietnamese civilians, comparing them to Nog5n-ri and to

Japanese atrocities in World War II.24. Hankyoreh 21, 4 May 2000, 2.

25. Ibid., 19 April 2000, 1.26. Korea Times, 20 April 2000, A3.27. Hankyoreh Sinmun, 28 June 2000, 1.28. Newsreview (Seoul), 19 December 1998, 7. However, when the Vietnamese

State president visited Seoul on 23 August2001, Kim Dae Jung said tohim I amsorry for the suffering caused to the Vietnamese people by our participation inthat unfortunate war. Kim further offered ROK financial assistance to buildhospitals in the five provinces of central Vietnam where ROK troops had beenactive. Hankyoreh Sinmun, 24 August 2001, 2.

29. These victims, as well as Koreans exposed to Agent Orange sprayed by the U.S.military in Korea along the DMZ in the late 1960s, continue to press the U.S.government, along with Agent Orange manufacturers Dow Chemical andMonsanto, for compensation. See Newsreview, 29 May 1999, 34.



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Statement of Concern

We, members of the editorial and governing boards ofCritical Asian Studies, con-

demn the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and

the attempted attack that resulted in the deaths of over five thousand people frommore than seventy countries. We strongly endorse efforts to bring the perpetrators

to justice and to prevent other assaults against people in the United States and else-

where in the world.

We urgently appeal to the president of the United States, the secretary general of

NATO, the secretary generalof the United Nations, and all other international lead-

ers to respond judiciously with restraint and careful judgment to these crimes. In

particular, we implore leaders of the United States and other nations to halt the

bombingofAfghanistanand to refrain from attackingother nations.The mechanism

of international human rights law and judicial institutions must be used to bring

those responsible to justice. Indiscriminate use of violent and destructive instru-

ments of war wreaks havoc on innocent lives and perpetuates hatred and strife.

As scholars and teachers in the field of Asian studies, we know of the devastating

impact of U.S. wars and other violent actions in that part of the world that have pit-

ted the superior technological might of the United States and other powers against

Asian peoples. We are aware of the suffering inflicted upon them as a result of warsin the twentieth century. We have witnessed the immense costs of overt and covert

wars and repressive states in Asia that fall disproportionately upon ordinary men,

women, and children and continue long after violent conflicts end. Our work docu-

ments the chasms that divide governing elites from common citizens and analyzes

the processes bywhich the desperate and disenfranchised come to embrace terror-

ism and follow the likes of Osama bin Laden.

These understandings lead us to assert that it is neither accurate nor just to hold

the government of a nation accountable for the crimes of a terrorist group that may

operate within its borders without clear evidence that the government shares re-

sponsibility for those crimes. Even when such evidence can be produced, as in the

case of Afghanistan, it remains critical that innocent civilians living within the terri-

toryof anystate found responsible for the recent terrorist crimesnot be punished for

the actions of a government. Protecting their safety must be a high priority inany re-

taliatory action.

Lastly and emphatically, we urge that there be no indiscriminate destruction inmeting out justice to those responsible for the crimes of 11 September 2001. Hu-

man rightsand the welfare of the innocent must be respected. At the same time, we

urge citizens of the United States and of other nations to reflect upon and seek un-

derstanding of the repercussions of their own nations policies at home and abroad

sothat their involvement in the cycles of violence and vengeance may be broken.

11 October 2001

armstrong, charles 2001 america's korea, korea's vietnam

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