The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare From the Korean War by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Korean War
ISBN: 9781466891104
Google: FVInBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: HenryHolt
Published: 2015-02-10T20:56:19+00:00

7

July 30, 1950

No Gun Ri, South Korea

Many hours after it ended, after the last cries echoed off the concrete walls, the elder brother stood outside the mouth of the tunnel. “Koo-hak!” he shouted through the darkness and rain. “Koo-hak!”

Chung Koo-hun had crawled away on his naked belly that first night of the killings. He crept up a slope and hid among the scrub pine. Over the next two days, he circled home to Chu Gok Ri, a village now in ruins. Then the guilt-stricken seventeen-year-old warily made his way back to the No Gun Ri bridge, staying out of sight of strafing American warplanes. The American troops had pulled back the day before, and Koo-hun heard from survivors that his eight-year-old brother was near dead when they last saw him in the underpass.

A single North Korean soldier, a nervous teenager, stood guard at the trestle. Koo-hun could make out the heaps of white. They were his neighbors, bodies stiff and swollen in the summer night.

“Koo-hak!” he shouted. Inside, the boy heard but could not answer. A bullet had sheared off his nose and torn his mouth. He was weak. His throat had gone dry. He tried to speak, but had no voice.

The elder brother drew a breath and jumped over the wall of dead blocking the way. Now he stood in the black shadows beneath the bridge. He stumbled over bodies spread on the underpass floor. “Koo-hak!” The boy heard him come closer, but still he could not speak. “Koo-hak.”

Suddenly, a hand shot out of the darkness and locked onto Koo-hun’s pant leg. His heart stopped. He reached down. He felt the shirt, the same coarse shirt he had worn as a child. He pulled him up, lifted him onto his shoulders, and found his way back out into the night, carrying a maimed little boy, the last survivor of the bridge at No Gun Ri.

* * *

“Comrades, you are liberated now.” The handful who survived remembered North Korean soldiers, on the afternoon of July 29, stepping among the bodies under the trestle to find those still stirring. They told them to wait until dark before leaving because American planes were strafing the roads.

The soldiers found “indescribably gruesome scenes,” a North Korean journalist accompanying them reported. “Shrubs and weeds in the area and a creek running through the tunnels were drenched in blood, and the area was covered with two or three layers of bodies. About 400 bodies of old and young people and children covered the scene so that it was difficult to walk around without stepping on corpses,” Chun Wook wrote in an article published August 19, 1950, in Cho Sun In Min Bo, a communist newspaper in Seoul.

The half-blinded “Golden Girl,” Hae-sook, and little brother Yang Hae-chan had shielded their wounded mother for three days. Now the mother, her legs riddled with shrapnel, told Hae-chan to lead his sister home. “Don’t worry about me. Hurry and go!” she told them. The boy and girl began a painfully

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