In L.A., Response Muted to Reports of GI Atrocities

Amid the fallout from recent reports that U.S. soldiers might have killed unarmed civilians during the Korean War, there has been a telling quiet among one community with a deeply personal stake in the news: Korean Americans.

Little has been heard from that increasingly visible and vocal population, even as the allegations of American massacres have topped the print and broadcast news and prompted a government investigation.

There have been no large rallies, demonstrations or calls for political action, even in Los Angeles, home to the nation’s largest Korean American communities. Those whose personal lives and family histories were fractured by the war say the calm reflects their knowledge of the cruelty that was rampant throughout the conflict.

The Associated Press has reported that U.S. soldiers machine-gunned civilians under a bridge at No Gun Ri, and later blew up bridges being crossed by civilians. The news stunned many, including Pentagon officials who initially expressed disbelief that Americans could have committed such acts.

Other than the AP reports, the only known case of large-scale killing of civilians by U.S. soldiers in this century was the 1968 massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese at My Lai.

In the U.S., where Korean War veterans have been largely ignored and the most prevalent media images of the war have come through the TV comedy “M*A*S*H,” few know of the war’s brutality.

Few, that is, except for those who were there or heard stories from family members.

“Everybody who experienced the war who was in their 20s or 30s knows both sides committed atrocities, and that the U.S. forces might have killed innocent Koreans. I don’t doubt it a bit,” said Yong Mok Kim, 74, a retired Cal State L.A. history professor.

Charles Kim, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Korean American Coalition, agrees, saying: “I don’t doubt it happened.”

Kim, who was born in South Korea after the war, said he had heard accounts of brutality by all sides. So the report of GI’s firing on civilians did not shock him. His concern, he said, was that “we prevent this kind of thing from happening again. We should do everything we can to honor those who might have been killed and compensate the survivors.”

Because the U.S. and South Korean governments have committed to investigating the alleged slayings, Kim said his group’s members have not felt it necessary to take a stand on the reported incidents.

Kim was pleased, he said, that the Pentagon will investigate the reports. “At least the government came forward and said, ‘Let’s find out what happened.’ I think it’s sincere, not a cover-up.”

Edward Park, director of Asian Pacific American studies at Loyola Marymount University, said the quiet among local Koreans reflects a delicate mixture of feelings about the U.S. role in Korea. “For a lot of folks this was old news,” he said.

“The silence speaks volumes. On the one hand, people are very thankful for the U.S. support in the war; on the other, they’re wondering how to raise the issue [of American atrocities] without appearing to be ingrates or sympathizers to North Korea,” he said.

Kim, the retired history professor, says it is naive to believe that anyone was above committing vicious acts. But he also said it is unfair to make moral judgments in hindsight. American soldiers at the start of the war, he said, “were under extremely difficult circumstances.”

A translator for the U.S. Army during the war, Kim said soldiers “didn’t know the language, couldn’t tell an enemy from a friend. I would be very cautious to make a final judgment of them.”

Kim’s sober response to the reported slayings is shared by many Korean Americans.

Kyung Min, an editor at the Korea Times of Los Angeles, who oversaw the paper’s coverage of the reported slayings, said there has been little response from local Korean Americans.

Min said he believes that many would probably support compensating victims, but there is not much interest in reviving memories of the war. “When a major story about Korea breaks, we usually get a lot of reactions, but we’ve gotten very few phone calls this time,” he said.

One reason may be that an investigation is imminent. “It’s being corrected; that’s a good thing,” he said.

Not long ago, another revelation of wartime atrocities against Koreans evoked an outcry from Korean Americans, whose population numbers roughly a million nationally, with hundreds of thousands living in Southern California. When news broke in 1992 that the Japanese army forced perhaps 100,000 captive Korean women to have sex with its soldiers in World War II, Korean Americans responded as forcefully as those in South Korea.

Japanese dignitaries visiting the U.S. were met by picketing Korean Americans. At least three novels and a play about the plight of so-called “comfort women” were written by Korean Americans, and a museum exhibit devoted to the subject was opened in Los Angeles’ Koreatown.

The low-key reaction to reports of U.S. forces killing civilians indicates a more nuanced view of America’s role in the war.

“The difference is obvious; you cannot compare the two,” said local writer Chungmi Kim, a Korean immigrant whose play about comfort women was produced this year in Los Angeles.

“In this case, the American government did not say ‘bomb civilians,’ ” said Kim, whose family’s house was destroyed by a U.S. bomb. “The Japanese made a national decision to recruit or force women to become comfort women.”

Although U.S. soldiers might have killed innocents in the panic of war, she said, their willingness to now admit wrongdoing is praiseworthy. “I am really glad the veterans are being honest now. It’s good for everybody--themselves and the two countries--to set the record straight. I just don’t know why it didn’t happen before,” she said.

The answer, said University of Chicago professor Bruce Cumings, can be found in South Korea and in the United States. While many Koreans might have seen or heard of atrocities committed by Americans, the repressive postwar political climate in South Korea made it dangerous to speak publicly of wrongdoing by the U.S. or South Korean forces, he said.

“For decades it was a direct ticket to jail to claim that Americans massacred civilians,” said Cumings, because until the mid-1980s, South Korea was ruled by U.S.-backed dictators.

During that era, when South Korean schoolchildren were taught to memorize speeches of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Cumings said the official view was of the U.S. and South Korean armies as “knights in shining armor.”

Even an academic book Cumings wrote about the war’s origins was banned in South Korea in the 1980s.

If South Koreans repressed memories and accounts of American misconduct, Americans had few chances to learn of them. In the early months of the war, American journalists reported that U.S. soldiers shot civilians. The reports were not followed up, however, when the military began to strictly censor war correspondents, Cumings said.

The U.S. military and government showed little interest in investigating reported American atrocities, Cumings said. “The official histories never breathe a word of South Korean or U.S. atrocities,” he said.

The lack of information from the U.S. discouraged scholars and others in South Korea from probing war misconduct, Cumings said. “If you were to run the risk and put this on the table in Korea, you would have gotten no support whatsoever from the American government.”

That support may finally materialize with the latest reports and the pledge by U.S. officials to investigate. That process, said Charles Kim, will give Americans a chance to make amends for the past and perhaps find ways to prevent future atrocities, wringing some hope from the tortured memories of surviving soldiers and citizens.

“Many may want to forget, but we need to clean up the mess we made,” said Kim, who served in the U.S. Army after Vietnam. “We’re doing this ourselves,” Kim said of the journalism that bolstered the claims of the alleged massacre’s survivors and the subsequent government commitments to investigate. “That’s what makes the U.S. a great country.”