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AM E RI CAS KORE A, KORE AS VI E TN AM

Charles K . Arm strong

Atrocities committed by American soldiers against Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War have once again become an issue of public debate in the United States, yet similar actions by South Korean troops fighting Americas war in Vietnam remain virtually unknown in the West. The Republic of Korea (ROK) dispatched more than 300,00 0 combat troops to Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, but after decades of enforced silence by successive authoritarian governments, Koreans have only recently begun 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 Korean veterans of the Vietnam War revealed for the first time detailed, extensive accounts of Korean atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. These revelations, and the controversy they triggered within South Korea, bring into bold relief the role of Koreans in Americas Vietnam War and the role of the Vietnam War in the political and economic development 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
ISSN 1467-2715 print / 1472-6033 online / 04 / 000527-13 2001 BCAS, Inc.

Before it was even halfway over, 2001 turned out to be a remarkable year for reviving repressed memories of Americas wars in East Asia. In January, the Pentagon concluded its fifteen-month investigation of the alleged massacre of Korean civilians near Nog5 n-ri (Nog5 n village) in July 1950.1 Although the Pentagon report 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 survivors of the Nog 5 n-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 Nog5 n-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. 3 Along 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, Koreans have been closely following the investigation of the Nog5 n-ri massacre. Koreas Ministry of National Defense (MND) has undertaken its own investigation of Nog5 n-ri in cooperation with the Pentagon team (and is reaching identical

Between 1965 and 1973 the Republic of Korea (ROK) contributed a cumulative total of more than 300,000 combat troops to the American war effort. ROK troops on parade in Vietnam, 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 Vietnamese civilians committed by South Korean soldiers fighting Americas war in Vietnam in the late 1960s. If the alleged massacre of civilians at Nog 5 n-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 own long-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 underground 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 Sinmun s 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 democratization and an unsparing critic of authoritarian government and the big-business conglomerates, or chaebol. Last spring, Hankyoreh Sinmun and Hankyoreh 21 began an exclusive investigation of atrocities by Republic of Korea (ROK) military 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 testimony of retired colonel Kim Ki-tae, former commander of the Seventh Company, 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 thirtyone-year-old lieutenant he had overseen the brutal murder of twenty-nine unarmed 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 Korean veterans revealed in graphic detail the horrors, still largely unknown in the West, 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 Second Battalion came under fire near the village of An Tuyet, although they suffered 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 together by the wrists as they searched for weapons. Finding no weapons in the vicinity, 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. Releasing suspected 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
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the men would escape, regroup, and cause more trouble. The Koreans were exhausted from six days of jungle fighting, their uniforms torn, faces painted black with camouflage, and Operation Dragon Eye had yet to show any significant record of VC casualties. What do we do with these bastards? a platoon commander asked Kim. Drag them over there! was Kims answer. The Vietnamese men, still bound together by rope, were thrown into a bomb crater that had been left by an American 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 Korean troops in Vietnam Kim was acutely aware of his direct responsibility 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 killed. 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 Nog5 n-ri and the American war in Vietnam itself, Vietnam was a guerrilla war. We couldnt discriminate between VC and non-VC. Civilians were aiding VC in VC villages, hitting us on the back of the head. Kim also revealed that a month earlier, on 9 October 1966, most of the population of Binh Tai village in the Phuoc Binh district sixty-eight men, women, and children were massacred by ROK troops, who set fire to the villagers homes and shot them when they fled the burning buildings. In unified Vietnam, there is now a monument in Phuoc Binh to the civilians massacred by the South Koreans. If the Korean War is a forgotten war in the United States, the Vietnam War is a forgotten, even forcibly suppressed, experience in South Korea. For Americans, 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 Koreans sound quite familiar to Americans, including post-traumatic stress syndrome, thousands of half-Vietnamese children fathered and abandoned by Korean 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 debate, 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 governments 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 reflection of embarrassment about being on the losing side especially after years of glowing propaganda during the Vietnam War itself about the rightness 530
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of Koreas participation in it and the cooperative spirit between the Korean forces and the South Vietnamese people. When the ROK sent its expeditionary forces to Vietnam in the late 1960s, the action was portrayed in the South Korean media as a noble defense of freedom against communist aggression, welcomed by the South Vietnamese. 6 Strict media censorship in the ROK until the late 1980s ensured that this interpretation of Koreas Vietnam War experience 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 Koreas Vietnam venture. As recently as May 1995, then South Korean minister of education Kim Suk-hui was removed 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 ambiguou s l ega cy of Ko r ea s Vietn a m emerge in South Korea. The growing Disabled Vietnamese survivor of an attack by popular consciousness of the war is ROK troops that killed forty in her village in 1966. (Credit: Hankyoreh 21, 27 April 2000) 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 complexity 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 to the United States itself and far exceeding all other Allied contributions combined. At its peak in 1967, the ROK troop presence in Vietnam was just over
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50,000. 7 According 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 precedent. As early as January 1954, the South Korean government under Syngman Rhee volunteered, through a communication with the U.S. ambassador to the ROK, to send a combat division to relieve the French in Vietnam and Laos. 9 The Eisenhower administration turned down Rhees unsolicited offer, in part because 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. However, 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. presence in Vietnam, the perception of the American planners changed. Despite criticism by opposition politicians and the domestic media, Park again volunteered South Korean troops to fight for the Americans in Vietnam, and this time the Americans agreed. ROK involvement began in September 1964 with a contingent 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, consisting 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 internationalize

Korean National Cemetery, Seoul. Kim Ki-tae, former commander of the Seventh Company, Second Battalion, of the elite ROK Blue Dragon Marine Brigade, bows before the grave headstone of a fellow ROK soldier who was killed in Vietnam. Kim revealed the horrible 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 unpopular dictatorship and a continued American troop commitment. But the primary motivation for ROK participation, and perhaps its greatest long-term benefit to South Korea, was economic. Vietnam was a goldmine for South Korea. A decade earlier, Japanese prime minister 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 Vietnam War spurred the South Korean economy and helped sustain the Park dictatorship. 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 billion. In 1967 alone war-related income accounted for nearly 4 percent of South Koreas GNP and 20 percent of its foreign exchange earnings. In particular, South Koreas emergent heavy-industry 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, including 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 behavior. This fact was not lost on the American force commanders, who could criticize ROK behavior while acknowledging its usefulness. For example, U.S. forces commander 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 anecdotal, 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 atrocities through 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 example, 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 that the Koreans took the noses and ears of VC victims home as souvenirs. Although this was apparently sometimes done by Americans in Vietnam as well, systematic 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 Japanese 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 be dismissed. This ferocity may be explained by several factors: the experience of the Korean War and the nature of ROK military training that shaped the Korean soldiers; the legacy of Japanese wartime imperialism; and the ambiguous racial one might even say semi-colonial position of the Korean soldiers placed between 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 million Koreans. Many of the Korean civilian deaths were 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 Korea (September-December 1950) probably number in the hundreds of thousands. 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 soldiers, partly because of the South Korean militarys roots in the Japanese military, 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 ordeal that could sometimes be fatal. It is not difficult to imagine these young soldiers, in the confusing conditions of war far from their homeland, few able to speak French or English (much less Vietnamese), losing their sense of discrimination and control in combat. 534
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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 descended 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 in their 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 certainly 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 Manchurian 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 they had 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 novelist 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 American criminal investigation officer and his Korean counterpart drive through the streets of Da Nang, they carry on the following dialogue: Youre a Korean, arent you? Your girls are also nice. There were two Korean girls in the strip show at the club last night. Both of them looked exactly like American women. You mean an American army club? Yes, but Koreans can go there if theyre working for investigation headquarters. 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 position between the colonizer (the Americans) and the colonized (the Vietnamese) 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 Vietnam vets told Hankyoreh Sinmun about atrocities they had witnessed or participated 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 Nog 5 n-ri.21 These public, detailed accounts of atrocities have brought the discussion of the Vietnam War to a new level of awareness in South Korea. Although discussion of South Korean soldiers in Vietnam had been emerging in fiction and film since the early 1990s, 22 Hankyoreh Sinmun was the first to bring to light eyewitness accounts of atrocities. Some of the other media in South Korea 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 history 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 excused any such actions by ROK troops by saying that they could not differentiate innocent civilians from Viet Congs. 24 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MOFAT), meanwhile, has said that such revelations could damage warming economic and political relations between the ROK and socialist Vietnam, and they would not be good for the 5,500 Korean compatriots living in Vietnam.25 MOFAT also cautioned that if accusations that our troops committed atrocities in the Vietnam War are made repeatedly, Seouls bargaining power in the Nog5 n-ri talks with the U.S. will be weakened significantly. 26 According 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 response, however, when an irate group of friends of the Korean military descended 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 of Hankyoreh Sinmun s 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 reported the incident. 536
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The ROK government, eager to cooperate with the United States in the investigation of Nog5 n-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 forthcoming with information for Hankyoreh Sinmun s reporters, has not sought to make a public issue of this history with the ROK government. Economic considerations are undoubtedly an important factor here also. By the late 1990s, South Korea was Vietnams fourth-largest trading partner and fifth-largest foreign investor, behind Japan and ahead of the United States. The now-floundering 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 estimated 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 disturbing layer of the history of Americas wars in Asia. This heretofore hidden history 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 governments, 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.

N otes
1 2. For the full text of the Pentagon report online, see http://www.army/mil/ nogunri. Responding to President Clintons expression of regret for the incident and the U.S. governments offer to pay for a monument to the victims, some of the Korean survivors responded, We dont need the scholarship and monument.We want a more sincere apology, not a vague statement of regret, from the U.S. government. New York Times , 6 December 2000, A1. Gregory L. Vistica, What Happened in Thanh Phong, The New York Times Magazine , 29 April 2001. Korea Update (Seoul), January 2001, 1.

3. 4.

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

Hankyoreh Sinmun, 19 April 2000, 1; Hankyoreh 21 , 27 April 2000, 34-37. In fact, the decision to send ROK troops to Vietnam was worked out solely between the United States and South Korea, without consulting the Republic of Vietnam governmen t in the matter. Tae Yang Kwak, The Vietnam War and Korean National Development, M.A. thesis (Harvard University, 1999), 26-27, based on memoranda between William P. Bundy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, archived in the Johnson Library. 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-larges t non-U.S. foreign combat force in Vietnam was the Australian contingent, which peaked at 11,58 6 in 1970 less than one-quarter the number of South Koreans that same year. ROK government figures give the number of total troops deployed as 312,85 3 over the eight-year period of South Korean combat activity in Vietnam. In addition, some 16,000 South Korean civilian s were employed in Vietnam during the war. Cited in Ahn Junghyo, A Double Exposure of the War, in Americas Wars in Asia: 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 the large number of ROK troops in Vietnam and the dangerous field positions they occupied, this casualty figure seems suspiciously low. Nevertheless, this remains the official ROK record of casualties. According to South Korean MND statistics as well, some 41,00 0 VC were killed by ROK troops, but this figure is also difficult if not impossible to verify. Dong-Ju Choi, The Political Economy of Koreas Involvemen t in the Second Indo-China War, Ph.D. diss. (University of London, 1995), 90; cited in Kwak, Vietnam War, 9-10. Kwak, Vietnam War, 19-20. Considering that almost an entire generation of Americans were familiar with Korea primarily through the television show M.A.S.H., ostensibly set in the Korean War but really about the Vietnam War, it may seem appropriate that the Koreans first direct involvemen t with the Vietnam War would be through a MASH unit. The Capital Division would later, under the command of General Roh Tae Woo, play a pivotal role in the 1979 Chun Doo Hwan coup, and Roh would succeed Chun as ROK president in 1988. Jung-en Woo notes that, even though exports to Vietnam in the late 1960s made up only 3.5 percent of South Koreas total exports, Vietnam took in 94.29 percent 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 chemical exports. See Jung-en Woo, Race to the Swift: State and Finance in Korean Industrialization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 94-86 . Without Vietnam as a largely captive market for such goods in the 1960s, it is highly unlikely that South Korea could have become so successful in these sectors in the 1970s and 1980s. John Lie, Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 64. Quoted in Harry G. Summers Jr., Historical Atlas of the Vietnam War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 154. 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 Cataract (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 673-80 . Han Hong-koo, Massacre Breeds Massacre, Hankyoreh 21, 4 May 2000, 26. During World War II, Korean soldiers in the Japanese wartime empire had a reputation for harshness not unlike that of the ROKs in Vietnam. Korean POW guards in Southeast Asia, for example, were particularly well known for their
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17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

brutality as were Korean police in Manchuria. See Bruce Cumings, Koreas Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), 178. It certainly appears that U.S. military planners were looking at the Japanese success in counterinsurgency to learn lessons for Vietnam. See Chong-Sik Lee, Counterinsurgency in Manchuria: The Japanese Experience, 1931-194 0 (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1967), a translation of Japanese counterinsurgency documents commissioned by RAND at the height of the Vietnam War. The documents include lengthy descriptions of the Japanese militarys extensive practice of relocating farmers to collective hamlets (shudan buraku), with obvious parallels to the strategic hamlet policy of the United States in Vietnam. Just as the ROK forces who fought in Vietnam have been largely forgotten in the United States, so too the hundreds of thousands of Korean colonial subjects who fought in the Japanese Imperial Army have been almost completely forgotten in Japan. Hwang Suk-young, Shadow of Arms , trans. Chun Kyung-ja (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, East Asia Program, 1994), 25. This suggests another aspect of the Korean presence in Vietnam that is widely known anecdotally but has never been investigated empirically, namely, the apparently large number of entertainment women as well as the men who worked with and employed them brought from South Korea to service both Koreans and Americans. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). Hankyoreh Sinmun, 4 May 2000, 20. 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 of the same name in 1992. Interestingly, the Korean title of both the novel and film translates as White War, with obvious racial implications, but the author himself chose to translate it differently. For example, in early 2001 the journal Korea Report 21, published by the Korean House for International Solidarity, produced a collection of articles on Korean massacres of Vietnamese civilians, comparing them to Nog5 n-ri and to Japanese atrocities in World War II. Hankyoreh 21 , 4 May 2000, 2. Ibid., 19 April 2000, 1. Korea Times , 20 April 2000, A3. Hankyoreh Sinmun, 28 June 2000, 1. Newsreview (Seoul), 19 December 1998, 7. However, when the Vietnamese State president visited Seoul on 23 August 2001, Kim Dae Jung said to him I am sorry for the suffering caused to the Vietnamese people by our participation in that unfortunate war. Kim further offered ROK financial assistance to build hospitals in the five provinces of central Vietnam where ROK troops had been active. Hankyoreh Sinmun, 24 August 2001, 2. 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 and Monsanto, for compensation. See Newsreview, 29 May 1999, 34.

Armstrong/Amer icas Korea, Koreas Vietnam

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Statem ent of Concern

We, members of the editorial and governing boards of Critical Asian Studies, condemn 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 from more 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 elsewhere in the world. We urgently appeal to the president of the United States, the secretary general of NATO, the secretary general of the United Nations, and all other international leaders 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 bombing of Afghanistan and to refrain from attacking other 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 instruments 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 pitted 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 wars in 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 documents the chasms that divide governing elites from common citizens and analyzes the processes by which the desperate and disenfranchised come to embrace terrorism 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 responsibility 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 territory of any state found responsible for the recent terrorist crimes not be punished for the actions of a government. Protecting their safety must be a high priority in any retaliatory action. Lastly and emphatically, we urge that there be no indiscriminate destruction in meting out justice to those responsible for the crimes of 11 September 2001. Human rights and 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 understanding of the repercussions of their own nations policies at home and abroad so that their involvement in the cycles of violence and vengeance may be broken. 11 October 2001

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Critical Asian Studies 3 3: 4 ( 2001 )