Last week I had the opportunity to speak before the Seoul Rotary Club in regards to the No Gun Ri issue that readers know I have written much about. The Seoul Rotary Club was an excellent audience to speak before which included many of Seoul’s business leaders with many of them actually having lived through the Korean War period. This made for many excellent questions during the questions and answer period. It was a great opportunity for me and hopefully everyone at the Seoul Rotary Club learned as much from my briefing as I did from discussing this issue with them.

Unfortunately I could not include all the details of this issue within the 20-25 minute briefing time limit I was given thus I had to generalize many of the key points. For those that would like to read more in depth information about this topic I highly recommend reading the below articles I have written about the No Gun Ri issue:

Responding to the Bridge at No Gun Ri

The Forensics of No Gun Ri

I also recommend readers checkout both Robert Bateman’s book as well as the below article on his views regarding the No Gun Ri incident:

No Gun RI: A Military History of the Korean War Incident

No War Crime at No Gun Ri

Hanley’s response to Bateman’s article can be read here.

For those really looking to get some extremely in depth information they can read the US Army’s Inspector General report on the No Gun Ri incident. In my opinion the report could have been written better but is still a quality document filled with useful information. Do make sure to read the annexes that are filled with great information for those willing to take the time to read through them.

I also recommend that people read my latest postings disputing the current AP attempts at rewriting Korean War history:

Rehashing Korean War Executions

Rehashing Korean War Executions Again

Below is the fold is a transcript of the briefing I gave to the club:

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Good afternoon. Before we get started I would just like to thank Mr. Tom Coyner who unfortunately could not be here today for inviting me to speak before this fine audience. Mr. Coyner has read some of my prior articles in regards to the Korean War and thought this audience would find my writings of interest. I have had the opportunity to speak on a variety of Korea related topics to a number of military audiences before but this is the first time I have had the chance to address a civilian audience. So it is great to have this chance to speak before a civilian audience, especially one as prestigious as the Seoul Rotary Club.

Also as the introduction stated I am a US Army officer but I need to make clear before we start that I am speaking here today as a private citizen and not any way speaking for USFK or the US military.

With the introduction and disclaimer out of the way we will go ahead and get into the briefing. The briefing today as the slide shows is about the No Gun Ri incident that happened in the early days of the Korean War that probably everyone here in audience has heard about before. I hope today to inform everyone of information about this incident that many of you may have never heard about before today and how it has led to a movement to rewrite the history of the Korean War.

Like most people I first became aware of the No Gun Ri incident in 1999 when the Associated Press writers Charles Hanley, Martha Mendoza, and Choe Sang-hun made international headlines with their publication of the article “The Bridge at No Gun Ri” that alleged that the US Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment massacred South Korean refugees underneath a bridge during the opening weeks of the Korean War. The article was sourced with interviews of Korean refugees that survived the alleged massacre along with a host of ex-GI witnesses.

According to the AP’s version of event the No Gun Ri incident began on July 25, 1950 when US soldiers evacuated South Korean civilians from the villages of Im Gae Ri and Joe Gok Ri. The next day on July 26th, the refugee column of approximately 700 people was moving along the train tracks when they were strafed and bombed by an American aircraft that killed up to 100 people. The refugees would later seek shelter underneath the double railway bridge at No Gun Ri to only be shot and massacred over the next three days by soldiers of the 7th Cavalry Regiment. The AP claims up to 300 people died under the bridge for a grand total of 400 people killed total during the entire incident.

The allegations in the article were truly shocking and reverberated around the world’s media outlets. The allegations caused anti-American protests in Korea along with demands for a $400 million dollar compensation package from the alleged victims. The trio of AP writers would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism, but lost initially in the furor over No Gun Ri was whether the allegations were true or not?

It took sometime for critics to research the allegations and to expose the AP’s sensationalism, but in May 2000 reports of the AP using testimony from fraudulent GI witnesses who could not have possibly been at No Gun Ri were first published. More reports critical of the GI witnesses used by the AP followed and eventually culminated in a book written by then Army Major and West Point historian Robert Bateman that strongly challenged much of the witness testimony and documentary evidence that the AP presented in their article.

The lead AP writer Charles Hanley did everything possible to stop the publication of the book by threatening Bateman, contacting his commander, and tried to intimidate his publisher. The reasons for Hanley’s desperation to stop the publication of Bateman’s book will become more clearer later on in the brief.

Unsurprisingly the controversy over what happened at No Gun Ri expanded into a major issue of contention between the US and South Korean governments. In order to determine exactly what did happen at No Gun Ri 50 years ago, a joint investigation was launched by both governments to settle the No Gun Ri issue. The report from the investigation that was released in January 2001 was long and detailed, but it did not offer a definitive conclusion on what happened and how many people were killed due to differences between the Korean and US investigators.

Next, we will quickly go through some of the pertinent facts surrounding the No Gun Ri issue. The No Gun Ri issue is broke down into three separate significant events, the village evacuation, the air strike, and the killing of the refugees under the bridge. We will go through each of these significant events in the following slides.

First of all the evacuation of South Korean civilians is the first aspect of the No Gun Ri incident that is disputed. The AP claims civilians from the villages of Im Gae Ri and Joe Gok Ri were evacuated by US soldiers. No 7th Cavalry soldier remembers ever evacuating those villages because they were in the middle of a confused night time retreat at the time and had little time to evacuate themselves much less hundreds of civilians.

Retreating soldiers from either the 8th or 5th Cavalry who were deployed ahead of the 7th Cavalry may have stopped at the villages. The soldiers had just got done fighting for their lives against the North Koreans and were retreating down the only road in the area plus they were very wary of North Korean infiltrators disguised as “civilians” because they had already had a number of engagements with these “civilians” during the last battle. After all of this does it make sense that these soldiers would then stop to evacuate two villages and clog up the road even more than it already was and allow even more refugees for infiltrators to hide among?

Not likely, but what is likely is that the villagers simply left on their own and the Korean witnesses who were children at the time were under the mistaken impression they were being escorted on the road because of all the US soldiers retreating on the road with them.

The next aspect of what the AP claims happened at No Gun Ri is the air strike that supposedly killed 100 people.

The AP writers use Air Force after action reports to support the claim that the refugee column at No Gun Ri was strafed. The two Air Force reports the AP cites as proof of the strafing of civilians at No Gun Ri cannot be correct simply because of the time of the strafings. Both reports had the air strike happening in the evening. The Korean witnesses claimed that the strafing attack happened earlier in the day not in the evening. By the time these two planes flew their two missions the refugees were already under the bridge.

The AP reporters also highlight from the first after action report that “50 to 100 troops” were killed or wounded during the mission. The reporters than links the 100 civilians allegedly killed at No Gun Ri by a strafing to this report about “troops” being targeted by a strafing attack. However, if you read the rest of the report you will see that that the aircraft not only strafed “troops” but also destroyed two enemy tanks and a truck with those troops.

Plus the locations of all these targets were not in the location that the refugees claim they were strafed. However, the location of three miles south Yongsan-ni in the report for the strafed troops shows that the troops were in fact located on high ground of what was templated as the enemy’s frontline position and not along a railroad track.

This is all information from the actual report that the AP conveniently fails to mention in the article. These AP writers are notorious for claiming they used some declassified or secret report to uncover some new revelation but when you actually do the research yourself and look at the reports you see that the AP used reports declassified many years ago and they only took small excerpts from the reports and presented them in a way that supports the narrative such as leaving out the fact that the “troops” were strafed with enemy tanks and trucks in the vicinity.

Some additional pertinent information left out of the AP article is the fact that the 7th Cavalry could not have possibly called in an air strike as the Korean witnesses claim because they did not have the necessary radios to do so.

The only air strike in the No Gun Ri area occurred on July 27th, which was one day after the refugees say they were strafed. This air strike on the 27th was when the 7th Cavalry headquarters was strafed. This strafing of the 7th Cavalry caused their commander to request an Air Force Tactical Air Control Party (TACP) to the regiment who had the necessary radios to talk to the pilots in order to avoid any further strafings of the 7th Cavalry.

To further determine what happened at the double railway tunnel at No Gun Ri, the Pentagon review team requested that the Defense Intelligence Agency research their photographic archives for any imagery taken during the timeframe of the No Gun Ri incident. DIA was able to locate two sets of aerial reconnaissance missions that were flown in the vicinity of No Gun Ri on August 6, 1950 and September 19, 1950. Upon the discovery of this film, the Pentagon review team had the Department of Defense’s National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) analyze both sets of film. Additionally the Pentagon review team had aerial imagery experts from the South Korean 39th Tactical Reconnaissance Group analyze the film as well.

Obviously the August 6th imagery would prove to be the most interesting imagery since the pictures were taken only one week after the events that transpired at No Gun Ri.

The American imagery analyst found a possible strafing area just north of the double railway tunnel. The imagery analyst had no way of determining what date the strafing happened other then to say it was recent. The strafing for example could have happened days after the No Gun Ri incident when North Korean troops were strafed moving through the area. It is impossible to conclude on what day the possible strafing happened. However what the imagery analyst discovered overall greatly differed with what the Korean witnesses claimed.

During an interview with a Korean reporter Korean witness Chung Gu-shik said the refugee column was bombed by a fighter jet, approximately one hundred people and many animals were blown to pieces, and that the railway was bent like “steel chopsticks”. He goes on to say the bombing lasted for a total of 20 minutes. The NIMA analyst found no signs of rails bent like “steel chopsticks”, no bomb craters, no left over refugee items, no dead animals, and most importantly no dead bodies.

The imagery evidence combined with the fact that no forensic evidence has ever been discovered leads one to believe that the refugees were not hit with an air strike near No Gun Ri on July 26th. What could have happened is that that Korean witnesses may remember being hit by an air strike on a different day in a different location. What is clear is that what they said happen did not happen at No Gun Ri.

The final version of events at No Gun Ri and the most significant is what happened underneath the bridge. According to the AP version of events 300 people died underneath the railway bridge, machined gunned down over the course of three days. As part of the review of the No Gun Ri incident the Korean government agreed to lead the forensic investigation of the No Gun Ri area and forward its findings to the Pentagon Review team.

The Korean government’s first forensic investigation at No Gun Ri was launched in July 2000. The government sent its Defense Investigative Command (DIC) team to conduct a forensic assessment of the No Gun Ri site. Upon the completion of the DIC team’s investigation they determined that marks on the culvert southwest of the bridge site and the bridge site itself were in fact from bullets fired at a close distance. At both the culvert and the bridge they discovered a total of 316 bullet marks with 59 of them still embedded with bullet fragments.

The FBI team that reviewed the DIC team’s findings did not agree with how the DIC team counted the bullets and how they classified them as being fired from American weapons at close range.

However, despite this, finding only a combined 316 bullets marks seems to be quite a low number considering the thousands of rounds that allegedly were fired at the refugees. The Korean witnesses claim that the 7th Cavalry soldiers fired at them for multiple days with both machine guns and small arms weapons for hours at a time. If such claims of multiple days of shooting at the refugees are to believed surely more than 316 marks would be left at the scene. The bullet markings should have totaled in the thousands and not the low hundreds.

The most interesting thing the DIC team disclosed in their report was that they unearthed Soviet bullets and shell casings around the bridge. Though it is impossible to conclude if the Soviet material was fired during the incident at No Gun Ri it is evidence that helps support the GI witnesses’ claims that they came under fire from the bridge. If one is to believe that the American manufactured bullets found at the scene confirm the Korean witnesses testimony of taking fire from 7th Cavalry soldiers, one has to also believe that the Soviet bullets found at the scene confirm the GI witnesses testimony of fire being directed at them from among the refugee column.

Additionally supply records show that the 7th Cavalry supply unit had Soviet and Japanese era weapons turned into them on July 28th after the events of No Gun Ri transpired.

Even more intriguing was that the NIMA analyst found no evidence of any bodies or mass graves anywhere near the bridge or in the general vicinity of the No Gun Ri area. The NIMA analyst looked for things such as long trench lines to indicate the location of mass graves and found none. He also analyzed the condition of the fighting positions. The fighting positions around No Gun Ri would have been a readily available means to dispose of the bodies since the holes had already been dug. The analyst found that the fighting positions were still intact and not filled in on the August 6th film. Additionally, he concluded that the fighting positions were still not filled in the September 19th film either; they had just shown signs of weathering.

This finding is also significant because Korean witnesses claim that mass graves were used to bury the dead. According to the footage, these mass graves do not exist. Additionally, Korean witnesses say that they returned to retrieve bodies between July and November 1950. They claimed the bodies were inside the railway bridge, along side the dirt road and railway tracks, and lying in other areas near No Gun Ri. Korean witnesses testified that they returned to the scene four to seven days after the incident and saw “many dead decomposing bodies in the area and that some bodies had been temporarily buried.”

None of these claims could be substantiated by either the August 6th or September 19th aerial footage.

In fact the imagery evidence was so damning that the Korean witnesses then began to change their stories and claim all those 300 bodies were stacked underneath the railway bridge and out of site of the overhead imagery.

That would mean that the refugees would have had to drag and stack 400 dead bodies underneath the railway bridge to include the 100 bodies killed further down the railway track by the strafing. For sake of example if we say the average Korean weighed 100 pounds at the time that would mean that the surviving refugees would have had to move 20 tons worth of deceased people underneath the bridge and then stacked them to where overhead imagery couldn’t see them.

Additionally they would have had to clean up all the dead animals and items the dead refugees left lying on the ground. To top it off they would have to do all this in the middle of a shooting war with the North Korean army bearing down on the area. This scenario is extremely unlikely.

In response the aerial footage was forwarded to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology that has one hundred and twenty forensic experts that specialize in identifying locations of mass graves. These pathologists have been used before to detect mass grave locations using overhead imagery in places such as Bosnia.

In the No Gun Ri footage they saw no evidence of bodies being dragged on the ground to be removed from the area as claimed, no blood stained earth, no signs of decomposition, or any scavenger activity in the area. In short, they found absolutely no evidence to suggest a mass killing had occurred in the vicinity of No Gun Ri or that bodies were dragged and stacked underneath the railway bridge.

In May 2007 a group of Korean researchers from Chongbuk University began another excavation around the site in order to find evidence of the alleged massacre. The excavation of the site was estimated to have cost $216,000 dollars. Despite this huge sum of money and months of excavating the investigators were forced to conclude that they could find no remains at No Gun Ri.

The Korean investigators tried to play down the significance of their lack of finding any forensic evidence by claiming that remains could have been removed by relatives for burial elsewhere or washed away by rain. The claim that villagers removed all the bodies has already been debunked by the forensic investigators that found no evidence of bodies being removed from the area in the overhead imagery.

Likewise if the bodies were buried in graves in the area much of the remains should still be recoverable despite the elements because other battle sites and areas where civilians were killed during the war have been excavated before and a wealth of remains recovered and personal items left on the battlefields have been uncovered. Why is No Gun Ri the only place where a wealth of forensic evidence cannot be found?

Display of recovered items from Korean War battlefield.

By now many of you may be wondering how the AP got the No Gun Ri story so wrong? Well the reason for such poor journalism is actually easy to find out.

Co-writer of the AP article Choe Sang-hun who is the person who initially discovered the No Gun Ri story, admitted in his book Korea Witness that before he even interviewed one witness or even went to the scene he wrote a 150-word story pitch to submit to his AP editor. In the story pitch he used the advice of one of his colleagues to “hype” the story by likening No Gun Ri to a “Korean My Lai”.

Choe found out about the story by reading about it in a Korean newspaper about No Gun Ri claimants protesting in front of the US Embassy in Seoul demanding that the US embassy investigate a US massacre at No Gun Ri. Without doing any research of his own Choe had already concluded he had found a “Korean My Lai”. Charles Hanley and Martha Mendoza at the AP office back in the US read the story pitch and began to run with it.

Korea Witness by Donald Kirk & Choe Sang-hun

This immediate conclusion of a “Korean My Lai” is in my opinion because the AP writers knew that just reporting a story of civilians killed during the Korean War is not something that would grab anyone’s attention. They had to make No Gun Ri bigger than what is was, they had to make it like My Lai because that is what Pulitzer Prizes are made of. Thus anything that discredited their version of events was ignored while anything that supported it was sensationalized.

Thus statements from Korean witnesses who most were young children when the incident happened were believed without question. Ask yourself how likely it is that a young child of peasant farmers living in rural South Korea would have the ability to remember exact dates, timings, and details of something that happened 50 years ago? Not likely yet their testimony is believed without question by the AP, which as I have shown in this briefing is highly inconsistent showing how flawed memories can be after 50 years.

So inconsistent that to this day the AP writers refuse to release their full transcripts of their interviews with the Korean witnesses to historians, which can be interpreted to mean they are trying to prevent critics from finding any more inconsistencies in the Korean witness testimony.

This attempt to create a “Korean My Lai” is also why the AP believed fraudulent US veteran witnesses while ignoring and misquoting veteran witnesses who were at No Gun Ri but did not fit the preconceived storyline the AP was advocating.

The person that helped the AP prove their storyline more then anyone else was a man by the name of Edward Daily.

Edward Daily

What is not mentioned in the article is that Daily was the first ex-GI to confirm the AP’s version of events when contacted by AP writer Charles Hanley. The AP had contacted 34 veterans before Daily and all denied the AP’s claims about what happened at No Gun Ri. Daily than went on to give Hanley contact information of other veterans in the 7th Cavalry. After doing this Daily contacted these veterans himself and discussed the events of No Gun Ri with them. By the time the AP writers contacted these veterans their memories had already been polluted by Daily.

After the AP’s original No Gun Ri story was released, Daily became the face of the No Gun Ri incident by conducting interviews for newspapers across the country as well as appearing on TV news programs. His most notable appearance on TV news was when NBC flew Daily back to Korea to be interviewed by Tom Brokaw. In all of these media interviews Daily told his tale of what happened at No Gun Ri as well as battlefield heroism during the Korean War which included winning multiple Silver Stars, being awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, as well earning a battlefield commission to lieutenant.

However, there was only one problem with Ed Daily’s tale, he was not at No Gun Ri that day. In fact he wasn’t even in the 7th Cavalry Regiment or even in Korea. Due to a US News & World Report investigation they found through documents in the National Archives that Edward Daily was in fact stationed in with 27th Ordinance Maintenance Group in Japan. Daily was not a decorated combat hero who was involved in the incident at No Gun Ri, he was in fact a mechanic in Japan of no significance.

The reasons for Daily’s fraud would later be revealed when he was convicted of frauding the US Veteran’s Administration for tens of thousands of dollars in compensation money due to post-traumatic stress syndrome he said he received during the Korean War. Daily was sent to jail in disgrace while the AP writers continue to celebrate their Pulitzer Prize.

How the media allowed themselves to be fooled by some one like Ed Daily is a story all in itself, but what is important to realize is that Charles Hanley found out Daily was a fraud on December 7, 1999 when he received documents from the National Archives proving that Daily was not who he said he was. Hanley received this information months before Daily appeared on NBC and a whole month before Hanley submitted the AP story to the Pulitzer committee for consideration. Knowing full well Daily was a fraud Hanley kept quiet about Daily and allowed him to become the face of No Gun Ri in the international media and slime an entire generation of Korean War veterans simply because he wanted to protect his chances of winning a Pulitzer Prize.

Charles Hanley

How Hanley was discovered to have received the National Archives documents exposing Daily as a fraud before submitting his article for the Pulitzer Prize is probably why Hanley so vehemently tried to stop the publication of Robert Bateman’s book.

The problem with veteran witnesses used by the AP did not stop with Edward Daily though. In the original AP article the writers mentioned the names of 13 GIs by name in the article as supporting the AP’s version of events except for the former unit’s squadron commander Herbert Heyer who said no such massacre took place. That left 12 GI’s that supposedly supported the AP’s version of events. Of these 12 only three fully supported the AP’s version of events, however document searches would reveal that none of those three GI’s to include Edward Daily was at No Gun Ri. Discounting the three GI’s that were exposed as not being at No Gun Ri, that left 9 that supposedly supported the AP’s version of events in some way.

However, in later media interviews as well as interviews done by the Pentagon Review Team, these veterans had a much different story to tell. For example when Herman Patterson was interviewed by the Pentagon review team he told them he was misquoted by the AP. His statement, “It was wholesale slaughter”, actually referred to his unit at the Naktong River when they were over run by the North Koreans.

Probably my favorite AP misquote in their original article is from a rifleman by the name of Louis Allen. When Allen was interviewed by the Pentagon review team he told them that he was on re-enlistment leave when the 7th Cavalry deployed to Korea and did not link up with his unit until August of 1950, long after the events that transpired at No Gun Ri. How the AP misquoted Allen as being at No Gun Ri is anybodies guess.

There are many more examples of misquotes but when it is all totaled up not one of the GI witnesses that was proven to be at No Gun Ri that day supported the AP’s version of events. This fact is consistent with the rest of the 130 veterans interviews the AP conducted where the veterans told the reporters they saw no such massacre as the AP described it take place at No Gun Ri.

Additionally, the Pentagon review team conducted hundreds more interviews where those veterans also said no such massacre happened. Some how all these veterans that disputed the AP’s version of events is discarded in the AP article in favor of dubious sources like Edward Daily.

So naturally the next question many of you may be thinking is, so what really happened then that day at No Gun Ri? Well we already have a pretty good idea what happened at No Gun Ri from the various veteran accounts of what happened that day. What really happened at No Gun Ri is best summarized by the account given by Buddy Wenzel who the AP for some reason did not include in their article. This is what Wenzel had to say about what happened at No Gun Ri that day:

The civilians started coming down the railroad tracks, on paths on both sides of the tracks… The front ones, there were like maybe 15 or 20 of them, and they were getting thicker beyond that. Somebody said, “Fire over their heads for a warning.” … I got out of my hole with about 30 other guys; we all had M-1s. Now, we had one machine gun up on the railroad tracks and another air cooled machine gun on the right. Well when we fired over their heads they panicked. … That’s when some of them started to run towards us. We were firing over them all this time.

Then somebody yelled, “We’re being fired at,” then there was a bunch that started shooting into the refugees … This all happened in a minute, but it all came out when we panicked ‘cause we thought we were getting shot at.

There was a lieutenant that was running down to that group I was with. I saw this little girl that was sort of in front, she was maybe four or five years old and she was coming down the track I shot towards her and she fell. Well, this lieutenant ran out there and picked up this little girl. Why … I can’t tell you. That’s why the lieutenant was yelling, “Cease fire,” and he was running. She was out there in front, by herself, and flailing here arms and throwing her arms down.

After the cease-fire I stayed where I was, maybe 10-15 yards from the track, and maybe six or eight guys went down the tracks from the group that I was with, and a few went down from on top of the tracks. One of the guys went down there and searched a few of the bodies, he … found a body with a burp gun, and he yelled, “Here’s the goddamned gun,” and he held it straight up and slammed it down on the tracks.

It is pretty clear that a tragedy did happen that day at No Gun Ri but it was not the “Korean My Lai” the AP journalists were so eager to create. The fact of the matter is that you had GI’s that were on the retreat and wary of North Korean infiltrators who fired warning shots over the top of the refugees in order to prevent them from advancing toward their frontline. This firing over the refugees was probably interpreted by the gunmen within the column as being directed towards them and they fired back which ended up causing US soldiers to fire directly into the refugee column.

Other veteran witness statements, Soviet shell casings found underneath the bridge, unit supply records showing Soviet weapons turned into the 7th Cavalry supply personnel, and prior documented instances of civilian clothed guerrilla fighters engaging US troops makes for a strong case that there were gun men within the refugee column.

Who were these gun men? Were they disguised North Korean soldiers? Probably not. It is more likely they were South Korean communist guerrillas. Before the Korean War began the Yongdong area of South Korea was a known communist guerrilla hide out. US veteran witnesses say the gun men they found dead underneath the bridge wore no uniforms. Veteran also say that the number of refugees killed underneath the bridge from the brief firing numbered to about 4-9 killed with more wounded. It is impossible to know but some of those wounded could have died later on increasing the death toll. Determining the exact death toll is impossible but it is not the 400 or simply “hundreds” as the AP claims.

Yes it was a tragedy what happened but the circumstances, motivations, and the numbers dead are vastly different from the narrative the AP wants people to believe.

To conclude today’s brief I would just like to say that a tragedy of some kind happened at No Gun Ri, but it is no where near the magnitude the Associated Press claims. The continuing tragedy of No Gun Ri is that the incident has taken on a political context by interested parties both in America and South Korea to bash the American military at the expense of the honor of hundreds of thousands of brave Korean War era veterans that went to fight for the freedom of a country most had never heard of.

The year 2000 was supposed to be the year that veterans of what has now been commonly called “The Forgotten War” were to get their due recognition of the sacrifices they made on behalf of preserving freedom in South Korea during the ceremonies across the US and South Korea commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Korean War. Instead of being commemorated these veterans were instead faced with accusations that they were a bunch of war criminals. These veterans deserve better then to be condemned by hear say and sensationalized media reports. An unbiased look at the evidence clearly shows that a massacre did not happen at No Gun Ri as claimed. Yet despite this, the claims of “hundreds” being massacred at No Gun Ri persists.

There is even plans to make a No Gun Ri theme park to further establish the No Gun Ri mythology into minds of Korean children. These ongoing attempts to slime an entire generation of veterans is what has made the Forgotten War now become what I like to call the Rewritten War, which is one of the continuing tragedies of the Korean conflict.

Thank you for your time.