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America's Korea, Korea's Vietnam

Article  in  Critical Asian Studies · October 2010

DOI: 10.1080/146727101760107415

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 Critical Asian Studies
33: 4 ( 2001) , 527-539

AM E RI CA’S KORE A,
KORE A’S VI E TN AM

Charles K . Arm strong

Atrocities committed by American soldiers against Vietnamese civilians during the

Vietnam War have once again become an issue of public debate in the United States,
yet similar actions by South Korean troops fighting America’s war in Vietnam remain
virtually unknown in the West. The Republic of Korea (ROK) dispatched more than
300,000 combat troops to Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, but after decades of en-
forced silence by successive authoritarian governments, Koreans have only recently
begun to grapple with the ambiguous legacy of the Vietnam War for South Korea. In
the spring and summer of 2000, testimonies in the South Korean media by Korean
veterans of the Vietnam War revealed for the first time detailed, extensive accounts
of Korean atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. These revelations, and the contro-
versy they triggered within South Korea, bring into bold relief the role of Koreans in
America’s Vietnam War and the role of the Vietnam War in the political and economic
development of South Korea.

We cannot sit idly by and assume the attitude of onlooker

while our ally falls prey to Communist aggression
as if it were a blazing fire on the other bank of the river.
— President Park Chung Hee, 9 February 1965

We must fight the enemy in Vietnam as we do in Korea.

Our efforts must be directed toward the extermination
of the Communists, reestablishment of peace,
and reconstruction of Vietnam.
— Lt. General Lee Sae-Ho, commander,
Republic of Korea Forces in Vietnam, 1 May 1966
ISSN 1467-2715 print / 1472-6033 online / 04 / 000527-13 ©2001 BCAS, Inc.
Before it was even halfway over, 2001 turned out to be a remarkable year for re-
viving repressed memories of America’s wars in East Asia. In January, the Penta-
gon concluded its fifteen-month investigation of the alleged massacre of Korean
civilians near Nog5 n-ri (Nog5 n village) in July 1950. 1 Although the Pentagon re-
port concluded that the U.S. military did not bear ultimate responsibility for the
massacre — a conclusion that was less than satisfying to many, not least the sur-
vivors of the Nog 5 n-ri killings and the victims’ families2 — still the army was
forced for the first time since the war ended in 1953 to admit that in the early
stages of the war “significant numbers of Korean civilians” were killed or injured
by U.S. forces in the vicinity of Nog5 n-ri. The Korean War, in other words, was
beginning to resemble what the Vietnam War would be in a later period. Then,
in April 2001, the New York Times Sunday Magazine carried a cover story about
an alleged massacre of Vietnamese civilians by a Navy Seals team led by former
U.S. senator Bob Kerrey, in 1969. 3 Along with a television interview with Kerrey
and other members of his platoon on the “60 Minutes” news program, the
newspaper story touched off a stream of commentaries in the U.S. media, the
likes of which have not been seen in many years, over the nature of, and the
blame to be apportioned for, America’s conduct in Vietnam.
Meanw hile, in a development virtually unmentioned in the Western press,
South Korea has been facing oddly parallel revelations of its own. In fact, Kore-
ans have been closely following the investigation of the Nog5 n-ri massacre. Ko-
rea’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) has undertaken its own investigation
of Nog5 n-ri in cooperation with the Pentagon team (and is reaching identical

“Between 1965 and 1973 the Republic of Korea (ROK) contributed a cumulative total of
more than 300,000 combat troops to the American war effort.” ROK troops on parade in
Vietnam, 1968. (Source: The ROK Army in Vietnam: Six Years of Peace and Construction, Seoul)

528 Cri tical Asian Studies 3 3: 4 ( 2001)

conclusions). 4 But while this has been going on, South Korean media have for
the first time reported detailed, eyewitness accounts of atrocities against Viet-
namese civilians committed by South Korean soldiers fighting America’s war in
Vietnam in the late 1960s. If the alleged massacre of civilians at Nog 5 n-ri made
the Korean War seem more like the Vietnam War than many Americans would
otherwise have believed, South Korea has now begun to grapple with its own
long-suppressed memories of Vietnam. These revelations are largely the result
of reporting done by the progressive South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh
Sinmun.
Hankyoreh Sinmun was born amid the democratic struggles against South
Korea’s military regime in the 1980s as a critical and much-persecuted under-
ground alternative to the government-controlled mass media. With the opening
up of South Korea’s media in the aftermath of General Chun Doo Hwan’s fall
from power in 1987, Hankyoreh Sinmun’s circulation increased till the daily
newspaper became the fourth largest in the country. Along with its sister weekly,
Hankyoreh 21, the daily newspaper has been a consistent voice for democrati-
zation and an unsparing critic of authoritarian government and the big-business
conglomerates, or chaebol. Last spring, Hankyoreh Sinmun and Hankyoreh 21
began an exclusive investigation of atrocities by Republic of Korea (ROK) mili-
tary in Vietnam, a subject widely known in South Korean society but one whose
details had long been denied or suppressed by successive ROK governments.
The most sensational and extensively detailed report was based on the testi-
mony of retired colonel Kim Ki-t’ae, former commander of the Seventh Com-
pany, Second Battalion, of the elite ROK “Blue Dragon” Marine Brigade. Now in
his early sixties, Kim testified to Hankyoreh in April 2000 that as a thirty-
one-year-old lieutenant he had overseen the brutal murder of twenty-nine un-
armed Vietnamese youth in Quang Ngai Province on 14 November 1966. 5 His
story turned out to be the tip of the iceberg; subsequent testimony by South Ko-
rean veterans revealed in graphic detail the horrors, still largely unknown in the
West, of Korea’s participation in America’s war in Vietnam.
Kim Ki-t’ae testified that from 9 to 27 November 1966, the First, Second, and
Third Battalions of the Blue Dragon Marine Brigade carried out “Operation
Dragon Eye,” a campaign to mop up Viet Cong (VC) resistance in their area of
operations in central Vietnam. On 10 November, the Sixth Company of the Sec-
ond Battalion came under fire near the village of An Tuyet, although they suf-
fered no casualties. Four days later, with memories of this attack fresh in their
minds, the Seventh Company came upon twenty-nine Vietnamese men in a rice
field. The Koreans arrested the men as suspected VC guerrillas and tied them to-
gether by the wrists as they searched for weapons. Finding no weapons in the vi-
cinity, the Korean troops were left with the choice of releasing the prisoners or
handing them over to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). This was the
last day of the first stage of Operation Dragon Eye. On 15 November the ROK
forces involved in the operation were supposed to hand over control of the area
to the South Vietnamese Army, which the Koreans held in low regard. Releasing
suspected VC to ARVN was tantamount to aiding the enemy, as far as many of the
Korean soldiers were concerned. They felt that there was a high probability that
Arms trong/Ameri ca’s Korea, Korea’ s Vietnam 529
the men would escape, regroup, and cause more trouble. The Koreans were ex-
hausted from six days of jungle fighting, their uniforms torn, faces painted black
with camouflage, and Operation Dragon Eye had yet to show any significant re-
cord of VC casualties. “What do we do with these bastards?” a platoon com-
mander asked Kim.
“Drag them over there!” was Kim’s answer. The Vietnamese men, still bound
together by rope, were thrown into a bomb crater that had been left by an Amer-
ican F4 fighter attack. The hole measured some 8 meters wide by 4 meters deep.
The Koreans stepped back and threw grenades into the crater, splattering blood
and flesh into the air. When they were finished, moans of the living could still be
heard emerging from the hole. The Koreans shouldered their rifles and fired
into the crater, ensuring that all were dead.
As company commander — the highest-ranking field officer among the Ko-
rean troops in Vietnam — Kim was acutely aware of his direct responsibility for
the action he recounted. As he told the Hankyoreh Sinmun, “Tens of people
lived or died according to my orders. If I said, ‘Release them! Don’t kill them!’
they would live, but if I said, ‘Hey, you sons of bitches, why are you crawling
around?’ they would be taken off and killed. Those twenty-nine were the same.
But now that I think about it, they were just farmers.” Still, as Kim explained, in
words strikingly reminiscent of American testimonies about Nog5 n-ri and the
American war in Vietnam itself, “Vietnam was a guerrilla war. We couldn’t dis-
criminate between VC and non-VC. Civilians were aiding VC in VC villages, hit-
ting us on the back of the head.” Kim also revealed that a month earlier, on 9 Oc-
tober 1966, most of the population of Binh Tai village in the Phuoc Binh district
— sixty-eight men, women, and children — were massacred by ROK troops,
who set fire to the villagers’ homes and shot them when they fled the burning
buildings. In unified Vietnam, there is now a monument in Phuoc Binh to the ci-
vilians massacred by the South Koreans.
If the Korean War is a “forgotten war” in the United States, the Vietnam War is
a forgotten, even forcibly suppressed, experience in South Korea. For Ameri-
cans, the massive participation of South Korean troops in the U.S. war effort in
Vietnam is a doubly forgotten event. Few Americans are even aware that Korea
had its, or rather our, “Vietnam.” The legacies of the Vietnam War for South Ko-
reans sound quite familiar to Americans, including post-traumatic stress syn-
drome, thousands of half-Vietnamese children fathered and abandoned by Ko-
rean soldiers and civilians, and the horrific effects of Agent Orange, for which
ROK veterans have been trying since 1994, so far unsuccessfully, to sue the U.S.
government and the chemical manufacturers for compensation. But while in
the United States the Vietnam War triggered open and sometimes violent de-
bate, debate on the Vietnam War in South Korea was silenced by the successive
military regimes and has only become a matter of limited public discussion in
the last ten years. This silence was partly the result of the South Korean govern-
ment’s attempt to suppress anything that might upset ROK-U.S. relations, partly
due to sensitivity over South Korea’s financial gain from the war, and partly a re-
flection of embarrassment about being on the losing side — especially after
years of glowing propaganda during the Vietnam War itself about the rightness
530 Cri tical Asian Studies 3 3: 4 ( 2001)
of Korea’s participation in it and the
cooperative spirit between the Ko-
rean forces and the South Vietnam-
ese people.
When the ROK sent its “expedi-
tionary forces” to Vietnam in the late
1960s, the action was portrayed in
the South Korean media as a noble
defense of freedom against commu-
nist aggression, welcomed by the
South Vietnamese. 6 Strict media cen-
sorship in the ROK until the late
1980s ensured that this interpreta-
tion of Korea’s Vietnam War experi-
ence would hold. Even in the war
memorial established in Seoul in
1994, the display on ROK forces in
Vietnam adheres to this relentlessly
positive representation of South Ko-
rea’s Vietnam venture. As recently as
May 1995, then South Korean minis-
ter of education Kim Suk-hui was re-
moved from her post for referring to
the Korean War as a “civil war” and to
South Korean soldiers in Vietnam as
“mercenaries.” Only in the 1990s did
public discussion about the ambigu-
ou s l ega cy of Ko r ea ’s Vietn a m
emerge in South Korea. The growing Disabled Vietnamese survivor of an attack by
popular consciousness of the war is ROK troops that killed forty in her village in
evident in the form of novels, films, 1966. (Credit: Hankyoreh 21, 27 April 2000)
and a slow trickle of information
from the mass media and a reluctant Ministry of National Defense.
Amid this wave of information and debate about Korea’s Vietnam, the com-
plexity and significance of the Vietnam War for the Republic of Korea has come
to light in an unprecedented degree, and the connection between Vietnam and
Korea’s political and economic development is becoming increasingly clear.
The common understanding, particularly in the United States, of the Vietnam
War in terms of the global cold war or U.S.-Vietnamese relations, has tended to
obfuscate the significance of Vietnam within the East Asian region. Perhaps
most importantly for South Korea, the Vietnam War is responsible, in no small
measure, for the Korean economic “miracle” of the 1960s to the 1990s.
Between 1965 and 1973 the Republic of Korea contributed a cumulative total
of more than 300,000 combat troops to the American war effort, second only to
the United States itself and far exceeding all other Allied contributions com-
bined. At its peak in 1967, the ROK troop presence in Vietnam was just over
Arms trong/Ameri ca’s Korea, Korea’ s Vietnam 531
50,000. 7 According to official South Korean statistics, not released until 1991,
4,687 ROK soldiers were killed and some 8,000 wounded in the Vietnam War. 8
South Korean President Park Chung Hee’s decision to commit ROK combat
troops to assist the Americans in Vietnam in the mid-1960s was not without pre-
cedent. As early as January 1954, the South Korean government under Syngman
Rhee volunteered, through a communication with the U.S. ambassador to the
ROK, to send a combat division to relieve the French in Vietnam and Laos. 9 The
Eisenhower administration turned down Rhee’s unsolicited offer, in part be-
cause of fear of provoking China and North Korea at a time when the ROK itself
was thought by the Americans to be unstable and militarily vulnerable. How-
ever, after General Park’s coup in 1961 and the establishment of a more stable
military government in 1963, coinciding with the escalation of the U.S. pres-
ence in Vietnam, the perception of the American planners changed. Despite
criticism by opposition politicians and the domestic media, Park again volun-
teered South Korean troops to fight for the Americans in Vietnam, and this time
the Americans agreed. ROK involvement began in September 1964 with a con-
tingent of some one hundred and thirty members of a Mobile Army Surgical
Hospital (MASH) and a group of ten Taekwondo instructors; thirteen months
later, South Korea sent its first full division of combat troops to Vietnam, consist-
ing of fifteen thousand members of the Capital (“Fierce Tiger”) Division and five
thousand members of the Blue Dragon Marine Division. 10
ROK assistance to the U.S. effort was based in part on political reciprocity: the
Johnson administration under its “More Flags” campaign sought to internationalize

Korean National Cemetery, Seoul. Kim Ki-t’ae, former commander of the Seventh Com -
pany, Second Battalion, of the elite ROK “Blue Dragon” Marine Brigade, bows before the
grave headstone of a fellow ROK soldier who was killed in Vietnam. Kim revealed the
“horrible acts” committed by his troops in Vietnam. (Credit: Hankyoreh 21, 27 April 2000)
532 Cri tical Asian Studies 3 3: 4 ( 2001)
the war, giving the war the appearance of an allied effort rather than a unilateral
U.S. action. In exchange, Park Chung Hee won renewed U.S. backing for his un-
popular dictatorship and a continued American troop commitment. But the pri-
mary motivation for ROK participation, and perhaps its greatest long-term ben-
efit to South Korea, was economic.
Vietnam was a goldmine for South Korea. A decade earlier, Japanese prime
minister Yoshida Shigeru had called the Korean War “a gift from the gods” for
stimulating economic development in postwar Japan; without the Korean War,
it is unlikely that the U.S. occupation would have ended as early as it did or that
the Japanese economy would have taken off as dramatically. Similarly, the Viet-
nam War spurred the South Korean economy and helped sustain the Park dicta-
torship. South Korea’s economic takeoff in the mid-1960s would not have been
possible without the profits gained by fighting for the United States in Vietnam.
War-related income in the form of direct aid, military assistance, procurements,
and soldiers’ salaries amounted to over $1 billion. In 1967 alone war-related in-
come accounted for nearly 4 percent of South Korea’s GNP and 20 percent of its
foreign exchange earnings. In particular, South Korea’s emergent heavy-indus-
try sector — steel, transportation equipment, chemical exports, and the like —
was given an enormous and invaluable boost by the Vietnam War. 11 Major South
Korean companies that took off during the war are now household names, in-
cluding Hyundai, Daewoo, and Hanjin, the parent company of Korean Airlines.
Park’s first five-year plan for Korean economic development was mapped out
with Vietnam in mind; the war, for example, largely paid for the construction of
South Korea’s first expressway, the Seoul-Pusan highway, built between 1968
and 1970. 12
As is well known by observers of and participants in the Vietnam War, ROK
soldiers in Vietnam gained a reputation for harsh, ferocious, even brutal behav-
ior. This fact was not lost on the American force commanders, who could criti-
cize ROK behavior while acknowledging its usefulness. For example, U.S. forces
commander General Creighton Abrams, comparing the Allied war effort to an
orchestra, once said that the Koreans “play only one instrument — the bass
drum.” 13 The ROK area of operations extended along the coast from Cam Ranh
Bay in the south to Qui Nhon in the north, and the ROKs (pronounced “Rocks”)
were viewed with a measure of respect and even fear by the Americans, who
rarely mingled with the Korean troops but were happy to send them to take care
of the tougher tasks of pacification. ROK officers in Vietnam included future
presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, and it was soldiers hardened by
combat in Vietnam who led the bloody suppression of the Kwangju uprising in
South Korea in May 1980, as General Chun consolidated his grip on power.
Evidence about the brutality of ROK troops in Vietnam remains largely anec-
dotal, and there has been until now no systematic investigation of atrocity
claims in Korea. The Hankyoreh Sinmun series of articles on the Vietnam War
was not only the first large-scale journalistic treatment of the subject in Korea,
but also the first Korean attempt to corroborate stories of ROK atrocities
through investigation in Vietnam itself. Kim Ki-t’ae’s story of sixty-eight civilians
killed by South Korean soldiers in October 1966, for example, was confirmed by
Arms trong/Ameri ca’s Korea, Korea’ s Vietnam 533
a Hankyoreh Sinmun investigation in Phuoc Binh. But even as anecdotes, many
of the atrocity stories show considerable and revealing consistency. For exam-
ple, an oft-told story is that ROK soldiers regularly cut off ears and/or noses of
VC to keep a record of the number of enemy killed; ear-cutting scenes occur no
less than four times in the film version of Ahn Jung-hyo’s Vietnam War novel
White Badge. Kim Ki-t’ae, in his testimony to Hankyoreh Sinmun, confirms that
the Koreans took the noses and ears of VC victims home as souvenirs. Although
this was apparently sometimes done by Americans in Vietnam as well, system-
atic slicing of ears and noses is strikingly reminiscent of the Japanese practice of
removing the ears of Korean victims during the Hideyoshi invasions of the
1590s. A mound of what are said to be Korean ears from these invasions remains
a tourist attraction near Kyoto, called the “Grave of Ears” (Mimizuka). There is
no evidence that Korean soldiers were deliberately mimicking this ancient Japa-
nese practice — something that would have been richly ironic given the history
of Korean-Japanese relations — but Hideyoshi’s record of atrocities in Korea
was an established part of every ROK citizens’ history education. Other reports
claim that ROK soldiers removed the hearts of living victims, or flayed entire
skins from killed VC to hang on the trees as warnings. While much research is
needed to confirm the extent and nature of Korean atrocities in Vietnam, the
ROK reputation for ferocity in the war is simply too well established — and too
often repeated by Korean, Vietnamese, and American witnesses — to be
dismissed.
This ferocity may be explained by several factors: the experience of the Ko-
rean War and the nature of ROK military training that shaped the Korean sol-
diers; the legacy of Japanese wartime imperialism; and the ambiguous racial —
one might even say semi-colonial — position of the Korean soldiers placed be-
tween the Americans and the Vietnamese. First, the brutality of South Korean
troops in Vietnam was indirectly a product of the brutality of the Korean War,
which killed upwards of 2 million Koreans. Many of the Korean civilian deaths
were the result of U.S. bombing, and not a few atrocities were committed by the
North Koreans and the Chinese. But the newly formed ROK Army seems to have
been particularly indiscriminate, and civilian casualties racked up by ROK
troops during the three-month UN-U.S.-South Korean occupation of North Ko-
rea (September-December 1950) probably number in the hundreds of thou-
sands. 14 Most of the ROKs in Vietnam had been young boys during the Korean
War and had seen at close range the inhumanity of that civil conflict. Educated
all their lives to consider “Reds” as less than human, such men were well-suited
for an anticommunist campaign of violence. The training of ROK frontline sol-
diers, partly because of the South Korean military’s roots in the Japanese mili-
tary, was — and to some extent remains — particularly harsh. Until recently all
able-bodied South Korean men, with very few exceptions, were required to
serve in the military for nearly three years, and basic training was a fearsome or-
deal that could sometimes be fatal. It is not difficult to imagine these young sol-
diers, in the confusing conditions of war far from their homeland, few able to
speak French or English (much less Vietnamese), losing their sense of discrimi-
nation and control in combat.
534 Cri tical Asian Studies 3 3: 4 ( 2001)
 A second, related reason for the Korean soldiers’ fierceness was the legacy of
Japanese colonial rule and wartime mobilization. As historian Han Hong-koo
pointed out in an editorial in Hankyoreh 21, the ROK army was directly de-
scended from the Japanese military and its officers included Park Chung Hee, a
veteran of Japan’s anticommunist counterinsurgency campaigns in Manchuria
in the 1930s. 15 And, like Park and other Koreans who fought for the Japanese in
their semicolony of Manchukuo, Koreans in Vietnam were fighting a war that
was not their own. They had no long-term commitment to Vietnam and had less
to lose than the main occupying power; the Korean soldiers were there to “get
the job done.” 16 Furthermore, Japanese counterinsurgency was, even as such
campaigns go, a particularly harsh and unforgiving type of warfare. 17 By 1940
the Japanese had succeeded in brutally “pacifying” most of Manchuria, but cer-
tainly did not gain much love from the local population in the process. Much
more than the Americans, the Korean officers who had come of age in the Man-
churian antiguerrilla wars were aware of the brutal nature of “successful”
counterinsurgency.
Finally, the Korean behavior can also be explained by the difficult interstitial
position of Koreans in a war with such glaring racial divides. The racist aspects
of the American War in Vietnam are well known and do not need to be repeated
here; the Koreans “looked like” the enemy and therefore had to doubly prove
themselves as effective fighters in the eyes of the Americans. And, again as they
had in the Japanese empire, the Koreans occupied a position that could be
somewhat elevated in the ethnic scheme of things. Just as Koreans in Manchuria
were often seen by the Japanese as superior to the local Chinese but inferior to
their Japanese masters in the 1930s, so Koreans could become more than
“gook,” if not quite “white,” in the eyes of the Americans in Vietnam. 18 The nov-
elist Hwang Suk-young, a veteran of the ROK Blue Dragon Marines in Vietnam,
illustrates this point in his autobiographical novel Shadow of Arms. As an Ameri-
can criminal investigation officer and his Korean counterpart drive through the
streets of Da Nang, they carry on the following dialogue:
“You’re a Korean, aren’t you? Your girls are also nice. There were two Ko-
rean girls in the strip show at the club last night. Both of them looked ex-
actly like American women.”
“You mean an American army club?”
“Yes, but Koreans can go there if they’re working for investigation head-
quarters. No gooks, though.”
“Who are gooks?”
“Vietnamese. They’re really filthy. But you’re like us. We’re the allies.” 19
The irony, of course, is that the term “gook” itself was the most widely used
American pejorative for Koreans in the Korean War (although the term did not
originate at that time, as is often assumed; the term was probably coined during
the U.S. war in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century). Fighting the
Americans’ war, the Koreans found themselves in the position of the Western
power in Asia, and they could see the “natives” from the Americans’ perspective
— a situation not unlike what Frantz Fanon described for the colonized black in
Africa: as “black skin, white masks.”20 Perhaps we can call this in the East Asian
Arms trong/Ameri ca’s Korea, Korea’ s Vietnam 535
context “yellow skin, white masks”: the Koreans’ ambiguous and unstable posi-
tion between the “colonizer” (the Americans) and the “colonized” (the Viet-
namese) encouraged an attitude toward the Vietnamese that could be even
more condescending and dehumanizing than that of the Americans themselves.
This helps to explain both the brutality of Korean forces toward the Viet Cong
and the disdain they felt toward the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
After Kim Ki-t’ae’s testimony was published in April 2000, several more Viet-
nam vets told Hankyoreh Sinmun about atrocities they had witnessed or partic-
ipated in. One officer described an ROK massacre in Phung Nhi, Quang Nam
Province, in February 1968, as “a second My Lai” (although it occurred one
month before America’s My Lai massacre) and said it also reminded him of
Nog 5 n-ri.21 These public, detailed accounts of atrocities have brought the dis-
cussion of the Vietnam War to a new level of awareness in South Korea. Al-
though discussion of South Korean soldiers in Vietnam had been emerging in
fiction and film since the early 1990s, 22 Hankyoreh Sinmun was the first to bring
to light eyewitness accounts of atrocities. Some of the other media in South Ko-
rea over the past year-and-a-half have followed suit with their own published
stories of Korean brutality in the Vietnam War. 23
The mainstream South Korean media has had little to say about Hankyoreh
Sinmun’s stories, and official circles have strongly suggested that this sordid his-
tory should be kept quiet. (As one MND General said to Hankyoreh Sinmun,
“Why bring this up after 30 years?”) The Ministry of National Defense denies any
knowledge of the massacre, while one high-ranking ROK military official ex-
cused any such actions by ROK troops by saying that they “could not differenti-
ate innocent civilians from Viet Congs.” 24 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and
Trade (MOFAT), meanwhile, has said that such revelations could damage warm-
ing economic and political relations between the ROK and socialist Vietnam,
and they “would not be good for the 5,500 Korean compatriots living in Viet-
nam.”25 MOFAT also cautioned that “if accusations that our troops committed
atrocities in the Vietnam War are made repeatedly, Seoul’s bargaining power in
the Nog5 n-ri talks with the U.S. will be weakened significantly.” 26 According to
this view, South Korean atrocities in Vietnam somehow cancel out American
atrocities in Korea.
The Hankyoreh Sinmun investigation did finally get a powerful public re-
sponse, however, when an irate group of “friends of the Korean military” de-
scended on the newspaper’s offices in Seoul on 27 June 2000. Several hundred
members of the “ROK War Veterans’ Association,” dressed in combat fatigues,
began a demonstration in front of Hankyoreh Sinmun’s headquarters in the
early afternoon. By 4:00 P.M., the mob was chanting angry slogans and throwing
rocks at the newspaper office’s windows. Shortly before 5:00 P.M., the group
stormed the building, trashing offices, destroying computers and printing
equipment, and injuring several workers. In the process the demonstrators also
smashed twenty-one cars that happened to be parked in the neighbourhood. 27
Other than the Hankyoreh Sinmun itself, not a single Korean newspaper re-
ported the incident.

536 Cri tical Asian Studies 3 3: 4 ( 2001)

 The ROK government, eager to cooperate with the United States in the inves-
tigation of Nog5 n-ri, has yet to make any attempt to look into the actions of its
own troops in Vietnam. For its part, the Vietnamese government while forth-
coming with information for Hankyoreh Sinmun’s reporters, has not sought to
make a public issue of this history with the ROK government. Economic consid-
erations are undoubtedly an important factor here also. By the late 1990s,
South Korea was Vietnam’s fourth-largest trading partner and fifth-largest for-
eign investor, behind Japan and ahead of the United States. The now-flounder-
ing Daewoo conglomerate, always eager to exploit “emerging markets,” built a
five-star hotel in Hanoi and has become the single-largest corporate investor in
Vietnam. When President Kim Dae Jung visited Vietnam for the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations summit in December 1998, he alluded to the war as “an
unfortunate period in the past” and said that the two countries should “build
forward-looking relations.” 28 But the past remains a painful memory for both
sides. Vietnamese survivors of South Korean atrocities have told their own
hair-raising stories to the Hankyoreh Sinmun. Most ROK Vietnam vets continue
to be marginalized and remain almost invisible in South Korean society. The es-
timated seven thousand Korean victims of Agent Orange were not included in
the 1984 class-action suit that gave compensation to victims from the United
States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (and were certainly not encouraged
to join the suit by then-president and Vietnam veteran Chun Doo Hwan). 29
Abandoned Vietnamese children of Korean fathers, though not suffering the
same racial stigma as Amerasians fathered by American soldiers, are equally a
tragic legacy of the war. Despite decades of forced amnesia in Korea, the truth of
Korea’s Vietnam has begun to emerge into the light, revealing yet another dis-
turbing layer of the history of America’s wars in Asia. This heretofore hidden his-
tory reminds us that America’s Vietnam War, as unique and extraordinary as its
tragic impact has been, is only one part of an East Asian regional conflict that
lasted three decades, from the 1940s to the 1970s, and involved a score of gov-
ernments, millions of civilians, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers from
across the region. Many details of this thirty-years’ war have yet to be uncovered,
but taken as whole this conflict has left behind a salient political and economic
legacy for today’s East Asia, as well a host of difficult memories on both sides of
the Pacific that have yet to be resolved.

N otes
1 For the full text of the Pentagon report online, see http://www.army/mil/
nogunri.
2. Responding to President Clinton’s expression of “regret” for the incident and
the U.S. government’s offer to pay for a monument to the victims, some of the
Korean survivors responded, “We don’t need the scholarship and monu-
ment.…We want a more sincere apology, not a vague statement of regret, from
the U.S. government.” New York Times, 6 December 2000, A1.
3. Gregory L. Vistica, “What Happened in Thanh Phong,” The New York Times
Magazine, 29 April 2001.
4. Korea Update (Seoul), January 2001, 1.

Arms trong/Ameri ca’s Korea, Korea’ s Vietnam 537

5. Hankyoreh Sinmun, 19 April 2000, 1; Hankyoreh 21, 27 April 2000, 34-37.
6. In fact, the decision to send ROK troops to Vietnam was worked out solely be-
tween the United States and South Korea, without consulting the Republic of
Vietnam government in the matter. Tae Yang Kwak, “The Vietnam War and Ko-
rean National Development,” M.A. thesis (Harvard University, 1999), 26-27,
based on memoranda between William P. Bundy and President Lyndon B. John-
son, archived in the Johnson Library.
7. Robert M. Blackburn, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags”: The
Hiring of Korean, Filipino and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War (Jefferson,
N.C.: McFarland and Co., 1994), 158. The second-largest non-U.S. foreign com-
bat force in Vietnam was the Australian contingent, which peaked at 11,586 in
1970 – less than one-quarter the number of South Koreans that same year. ROK
government figures give the number of total troops deployed as 312,853 over
the eight-year period of South Korean combat activity in Vietnam. In addition,
some 16,000 South Korean civilians were employed in Vietnam during the war.
8. Cited in Ahn Junghyo, “A Double Exposure of the War,” in America’s Wars in
Asia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory, ed. Philip West, Stephen I.
Levine, and Jackie Hiltz (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 166. Given the
large number of ROK troops in Vietnam and the dangerous field positions they
occupied, this casualty figure seems suspiciously low. Nevertheless, this re-
mains the official ROK record of casualties. According to South Korean MND
statistics as well, some 41,000 “VC” were killed by ROK troops, but this figure is
also difficult if not impossible to verify.
9. Dong-Ju Choi, “The Political Economy of Korea’s Involvement in the Second
Indo-China War,” Ph.D. diss. (University of London, 1995), 90; cited in Kwak,
“Vietnam War,” 9-10.
10. Kwak, “Vietnam War,” 19-20. Considering that almost an entire generation of
Americans were familiar with Korea primarily through the television show
“M.A.S.H.,” ostensibly set in the Korean War but really about the Vietnam War, it
may seem appropriate that the Koreans’ first direct involvement with the Viet-
nam War would be through a MASH unit. The Capital Division would later, un-
der the command of General Roh Tae Woo, play a pivotal role in the 1979 Chun
Doo Hwan coup, and Roh would succeed Chun as ROK president in 1988.
11. Jung-en Woo notes that, even though exports to Vietnam in the late 1960s
made up only 3.5 percent of South Korea’s total exports, Vietnam took in 94.29
percent of ROK steel exports, 51.75 percent of its transportation equipment,
40.77 percent of its non-electric machinery, and 40.87 percent of its chemical
exports. See Jung-en Woo, Race to the Swift: State and Finance in Korean In-
dustrialization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 94-86. Without
Vietnam as a largely captive market for such goods in the 1960s, it is highly un-
likely that South Korea could have become so successful in these sectors in the
1970s and 1980s.
12. John Lie, Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998), 64.
13. Quoted in Harry G. Summers Jr., Historical Atlas of the Vietnam War (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 154.
14. Callum MacDonald, “‘So Terrible a Liberation’: The UN Occupation of North
Korea,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 23, no. 2 (April-June 1991): 5-10;
Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, The Roaring of the Cata-
ract (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 673-80.
15. Han Hong-koo, “Massacre Breeds Massacre,” Hankyoreh 21, 4 May 2000, 26.
16. During World War II, Korean soldiers in the Japanese wartime empire had a
reputation for harshness not unlike that of the ROKs in Vietnam. Korean POW
guards in Southeast Asia, for example, were particularly well known for their

538 Cri tical Asian Studies 3 3: 4 ( 2001)

 brutality — as were Korean police in Manchuria. See Bruce Cumings, Korea’s
Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), 178.
17. It certainly appears that U.S. military planners were looking at the Japanese
“success” in counterinsurgency to learn lessons for Vietnam. See Chong-Sik
Lee, Counterinsurgency in Manchuria: The Japanese Experience, 1931-194 0
(Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1967), a translation of Japanese counterin-
surgency documents commissioned by RAND at the height of the Vietnam War.
The documents include lengthy descriptions of the Japanese military’s exten-
sive practice of relocating farmers to “collective hamlets” (shudan buraku),
with obvious parallels to the “strategic hamlet” policy of the United States in
Vietnam.
18. Just as the ROK forces who fought in Vietnam have been largely forgotten in the
United States, so too the hundreds of thousands of Korean colonial subjects
who fought in the Japanese Imperial Army have been almost completely forgot-
ten in Japan.
19. Hwang Suk-young, Shadow of Arms, trans. Chun Kyung-ja (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-
nell University, East Asia Program, 1994), 25. This suggests another aspect of
the Korean presence in Vietnam that is widely known anecdotally but has never
been investigated empirically, namely, the apparently large number of “enter-
tainment women” — as well as the men who worked with and employed them
— brought from South Korea to service both Koreans and Americans.
20. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
21. Hankyoreh Sinmun, 4 May 2000, 20.
22. Perhaps the best-known account in the English language is Ahn Junghyo’s
novel White Badge (New York: Soho Press, 1989), which was made into a film of
the same name in 1992. Interestingly, the Korean title of both the novel and film
translates as “White War,” with obvious racial implications, but the author him-
self chose to translate it differently.
23. For example, in early 2001 the journal Korea Report 21, published by the Ko-
rean House for International Solidarity, produced a collection of articles on Ko-
rean massacres of Vietnamese civilians, comparing them to Nog5 n-ri and to
Japanese atrocities in World War II.
24. Hankyoreh 21, 4 May 2000, 2.
25. Ibid., 19 April 2000, 1.
26. Korea Times, 20 April 2000, A3.
27. Hankyoreh Sinmun, 28 June 2000, 1.
28. Newsreview (Seoul), 19 December 1998, 7. However, when the Vietnamese
State president visited Seoul on 23 August 2001, Kim Dae Jung said to him “I am
sorry for the suffering caused to the Vietnamese people by our participation in
that unfortunate war.” Kim further offered ROK financial assistance to build
hospitals in the five provinces of central Vietnam where ROK troops had been
active. Hankyoreh Sinmun, 24 August 2001, 2.
29. These victims, as well as Koreans exposed to Agent Orange sprayed by the U.S.
military in Korea along the DMZ in the late 1960s, continue to press the U.S.
government, along with Agent Orange manufacturers Dow Chemical and
Monsanto, for compensation. See Newsreview, 29 May 1999, 34.

Arms trong/Ameri ca’s Korea, Korea’ s Vietnam 539

 Statem ent of Concern

We, members of the editorial and governing boards of Critical Asian Studies, con-
demn the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and
the attempted attack that resulted in the deaths of over five thousand people from
more than seventy countries. We strongly endorse efforts to bring the perpetrators
to justice and to prevent other assaults against people in the United States and else-
where in the world.
We urgently appeal to the president of the United States, the secretarygeneral of
NATO, the secretarygeneral of the United Nations, and all other international lead-
ers to respond judiciously with restraint and careful judgment to these crimes. In
particular, we implore leaders of the United States and other nations to halt the
bombing of Afghanistan and to refrain from attackingother nations. The mechanism
of international human rights law and judicial institutions must be used to bring
those responsible to justice. Indiscriminate use of violent and destructive instru-
ments of war wreaks havoc on innocent lives and perpetuates hatred and strife.
As scholars and teachers in the field of Asian studies, we know of the devastating
impact of U.S. wars and other violent actions in that part of the world that have pit-
ted the superior technological might of the United States and other powers against
Asian peoples. We are aware of the suffering inflicted upon them as a result of wars
in the twentieth century. We have witnessed the immense costs of overt and covert
wars and repressive states in Asia that fall disproportionately upon ordinary men,
women, and children and continue long after violent conflicts end. Our work docu-
ments the chasms that divide governing elites from common citizens and analyzes
the processes by which the desperate and disenfranchised come to embrace terror-
ism and follow the likes of Osama bin Laden.
These understandings lead us to assert that it is neither accurate nor just to hold
the government of a nation accountable for the crimes of a terrorist group that may
operate within its borders without clear evidence that the government shares re-
sponsibility for those crimes. Even when such evidence can be produced, as in the
case of Afghanistan, it remains critical that innocent civilians living within the terri-
tory of any state found responsible for the recent terrorist crimes not be punished for
the actions of a government. Protecting their safety must be a high priority in any re-
taliatory action.
Lastly and emphatically, we urge that there be no indiscriminate destruction in
meting out justice to those responsible for the crimes of 11 September 2001. Hu-
man rights and the welfare of the innocent must be respected. At the same time, we
urge citizens of the United States and of other nations to reflect upon and seek un-
derstanding of the repercussions of their own nation’s policies at home and abroad
so that their involvement in the cyclesof violence and vengeance may be broken.

11 October 2001

540 Cri tical Asian Studies 3 3: 4 ( 2001)

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