The Bridge at No Gun Ri, by Hanley, Choe and Mendoza

The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, by Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe and Martha Mendoza
Henry Holt and Company, 2001
268 pages plus 16 pages of b&w photos, epilogue and notes on sources, victim list, acknowledgments and index
Library: 951.904 HAN

[see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri for an alternate view]

Description
In the fall of 1999, a team of Associated Press investigative reporters broke the news that US troops had killed a large number of South Korean refugees, mostly women and children, early in the Korean War. ON the eve of that pivotal conflict's fiftieth anniversary, theri reports brought to light a story that had been suppressed for decades. The story made headlines around the world and sparked an official investigation by the Pentagon that confirmed the allegations the US military had dismissed, and Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe and Martha Mendoza were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.

In the summer of 1950, US military forces opened fire on a group of South Korean refugees at a railroad trestle near hte village of No Gun Ri. SUrvivors say hundreds died, mostly women and children. Retreating US commanders had issued orders to shoot approaching civilians to guard against North Korean infiltrations among refugee columns.

In The Bridge at No Gun Ri, the three journalists tell the larger, human story behind this dark chapter of the Korean War through the eyes of the people, both Korean and American, who lived through it. The soldiers were green recruits of the US occoupation army in Japan thrown unprepared into the frontlines of the war, teenagers who viewed unarmed farmers as enemies, led by officers who had never commanded men in battle. THe Koreans were peasant farmers trapped in their ancestral valley between the North Korean invaders and the American intervention force.

In a powerful, richly detailed narrative, The Bridge at No Gun Ri brings to life these Americn GIs and Korean villagers, the high-level decision making that led to their fatsl encounter, the terror of the three-day slaughter, the harrowing months of war that followed and the memories and ghosts that forever haunted the survivors. The Bridge at No Gun Ri also presents for the first time the full documented background of a broad landscape of refugee killings in Korea that lasted until 1951.

Based on extensive archival research, including newly unearthed documents that show unmistakably where responsibility lay for the widespread civilian killings, and more than five hundred interviews with US veterans and Korean survivors, The Bridge at No Gun Ri is an authoritative account of the terrifying events of July 1950-a long-buried secret from a misunderstood war.

Table of Contents
Preface
Korea map
The No Gun Ri area map
The US Eigth Army in Korea, July 1950
The Korean families
Prologue: the End of the Road
Part 1: The Road to No Gun Ri
Part 2: The Bridge at No Gun Ri
Part 3 The Road From No Gun Ri
Epilogue and Notes on Sources
A Note on the Pentagon REport
A Survivor's Petition to President Clinton
No Gun Ri victim list
Acknowledgments
Index



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