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The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War
The Bridge at No Gun Ri A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War Author:Sang-Hun Choe, Martha Mendoza, Charles J. Hanley The untold human story behind the killings of Korean civilians by American soldiers in the early days of the Korean War, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who uncovered it. In the fall of 1999, a team of Associated Press investigative reporters broke the news that U.S. troops had killed a large group of South Korean refugees, mos... more »tly women and children, early in the Korean War. On the eve of that pivotal conflicts fiftieth anniversary, their 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 U.S. military had dismissed, and Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe and Martha Mendoza were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. In the summer of 1950, U.S. military forces opened fire on a group of South Korean refugees at a railroad trestle near the village of No Gun Ri. Survivors said hundreds died, mostly women and children. Retreating U.S. commanders had issued orders to shoot approaching civilians to guard against North Korean infiltrators 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 U.S. occupation army in Japan thrown unprepared into the frontlines of war, teenagers who viewed unarmed farmers as enemies, led by officers who had never commanded men in battle. The Koreans were peasant families 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 American GIs and Korean villagers, the high-level decision-making that led to their fatal 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 that lasted into 1951. Based on extensive archival research, including newly unearthed documents that show unmistakably where responsibility lay for widespread civilian killings, and more than five hundred interviews with U.S. 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.« less