The Associated Press wrote a devastating exposé of one massacre of South Korean civilians by American troops in July 1950 at No Gun Ri. It was a bombshell when the A.P. broke the story in 1999.
The original A.P. site has now been taken down. If you want the whole story (except for the Streaming Audio interviews, which I could not download and save) from the original site, you can download it as a large PDF file from here. Or -- if this is too slow, and it may be on a dialup connection, you can download it in PDF format from our FTP site.
A briefer version, but enough for our purposes, has been put online here, at the website for the book that the three main A.P. reporters wrote about the story they investigated.
Make sure to look at some of the documents (in the link at the left), in which many American officers authorize, and even order, the shooting of civilians.
No one denies that the massacre too place. The Associated Press received prizes for this series. It also received a huge amount of criticism. Some individual facts in their series have been shown to be false. Meanwhile, Korean survivors claim it whitewashed a US Army policy of shooting Korean civilians.
Once you have studied this, please study with equal care the following sources:
Please study them very carefully. Compare them to the No Gun Ri materials you have read, and to the materials on the "Hue Massacre". Also pay attention to the second section in the Halliday and Cumings selections, on "Political Questions in the Civil War," and compare it to what you know about the Vietnam War so far.
Write 300 words about similarities you notice between the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Make specific references to all the readings above. Email to me and to your group.