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The ROK military officials are announcing that the military will begin removing barbed wire along popular South Korean beaches located on the East Sea.

South Korea wants to make its beaches more user friendly and thinks a good place to start would be by removing enormous stretches of barbed wire from its shores.

The Maritime Ministry said on Tuesday it will start removing barbed wire, used to slow down a possible North Korean landing, from some of its eastern coastal areas next year in order to make the sandy shores more inviting to South Korean tourists.

Any foreign traveler to the beach areas on the East Coast will instantly recognize how bizarre barbed wire, bunkers, machine gun emplacements, and watch towers are at popular beach resorts. However, the threat from North Korean commandos is very real on the East Coast with multiple infiltration attempts within the last 10 years that has ultimately killed many South Korean soldiers and civilians.

According to the ROK military the removal of the barbed wire will not compromise security:

“The job of guarding the coast can be done by closed circuit TV,” a ministry official said by telephone.

That closed caption TV they use on the US-Mexico border really works well too.

Kudos to anyone who can identify the popular South Korean beach pictured above.

Many people know the mythology of what happened at Nogun-ri 55 years ago. According to the mythology American soldiers killed 400 Korean civilians under orders from their higher headquarters so the US Army wouldn’t have to deal with the refugee crisis. After the slaughter the US Army then proceeded to cover it all up. However, what really happened at Nogun-ri no one will ever really know. It was a long time ago and the testimony of many of these so called eyewitnesses has proven to be false. The South Korean relatives of victims of the tragedy who are making claims against the US government, have continually raised their demands for compensation to now an astronomical $400 million US dollars. It just makes me wonder if they are more concerned about the money or the truth? So can their claims be trusted?

What is clear is that a tragedy did happen at Nogun-ri, many civilians were killed and no one disputes this. What is being disputed is the number of civilians killed and the motivations of the soldiers that killed them. Some want the public to believe that the killing of civilians was a standard policy of the US Army back then so they didn’t have to deal with the refugee crisis and that the Army in coordination with the ROK government has been covering it up for all these years. That is what the anti-military types want you to believe and what the common mythology around Nogun-ri is built around. However, the truth of what happened at Nogun-ri is more complicated than what the mythology suggests. To find the truth one needs to rely more on established facts than hear say from veterans who have since been proven to be liars and South Korean claimants who may be motivated more by money than the truth. So let’s look at the facts.

Bullet scarred walls of the culvert leading towards the bridge.

FACT #1: There was never an order to kill refugees.

Here is the key passage from an order from the 1st Cavalry Division Headquarters that is often quoted as proof that the division ordered the killing of refugees:

The 1st Cavalry Division Headquarters at 10.00am of July 26 ordered all units that “no, repeat, no refugees will be permitted to cross battle lines at any time.”

This passage is taken from a much larger order that dictates how to deal with refugees. The order created a system where the Korean police would consolidate care for and move the refugees through friendly lines at set times every day and forbid any movement of civilians at night. Leaflets were dropped to spread this information to include the Korean police going in and evacuating villages. No where in this order was there ever any orders to kill refugees as some people would like you to believe.  The order was to not permit civilians to cross battle lines who were not following the established procedures.

FACT #2: Many of the eyewitness soldiers at Nogun-ri were never even there.

The main witness of the AP report Edward Daily was discovered to be a mechanic in Japan at the time of the Nogun-ri incident and never received a battlefield commission, escaped from North Korean captors, or received the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest honor, along with a host of other medals as he had claimed. Daily was just one in a long line of eyewitnesses the AP reporters used to back up there story that were later proven to not be there by both Stars and Stripes reports and US News and World Report. If you read Robert Bateman’s book, Nogun-ri, Charles Hanley the head AP reporter of the original article even admitted to Bateman that he knew Daily and some of the other witnesses may have been frauds but used their testimony anyway. Here is a link from Newsmax that talks about Daily’s and the other veteran’s lies and the media’s willingness to believe them. Here is one of Daily’s quotes from the original AP article:

“On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming.” He added: “The command looked at it as getting rid of the problem in the easiest way. That was to shoot them in a group. Today,” Daily concluded, “we all share a guilt feeling, something that remains with everyone.”

Just sickening that somebody would lie about something like this and even more sickening that people will continue to use Daily and the other liars as a source to back up their own anti-American agendas.

FACT #3: The soldiers of 2-7CAV did not order an air strike on the Korean refugees.

Some of the claimants demanding $400 million dollars from the US government say that that the soldiers ordered an air strike on the refugees because allegedly someone saw a soldier talking on a radio and then a plane swoop in and begin strafing them. They claim that 100-150 people died from the strafing. US Air Force planes operate on an AM frequency compared to the FM frequencies used by the grunts on the ground. 2-7CAV did not own any AM radios to talk to the US Air Force planes. Plus they had no combat air controllers with them either to call in air strikes. Even today soldiers cannot call in air strikes without a US Air Force trained combat air controller calling them in. It was no different during the Korean War.

Plus the vast majority of the soldiers there recall no air strike on the civilians at Nogun-ri. They saw planes flying 4 miles away in the distance but not over Nogun-ri. Plus the US aerial recon photos taken days later showed two strafing marks in the area though it can not be determined which day the marks came from. Though the vast majority of soldiers proven to be at the scene do not remember a strafing run, let’s assume there was a strafing that day. The photos show that the strafing marks could not have possibly killed 100-150 people due to the length of the strafing. However, strafing of civilians did occur during the war along with strafing of friendly units including the Tactical Operations Center of the 1-7CAV the very next day. The cav had actually been strafed more heavily than the strafing marks found near Nogun-ri and they suffered much fewer casualties than what the refugee advocates claim.

It wasn’t just civilians getting strafed by the Air Force. Task Force Smith the first US Army unit to fight in the war was strafed by their own planes as well. The cause of this strafing was poor communications due to the lack of radios and combat air controllers and a lack of training in close combat air support. Plus the general confusion of the uncontemporary operating environment that the Korean War was only contributed more to the strafing problem. Then you add in the fact that pilot training in those days was focused more on air to air dogfights than close ground support and this was just a disaster waiting to happen. So strafing of civilians did happen in the Korean War along with strafings of US soldiers and other coalition troops, no one denies that, it more than likely didn’t happen that day at Nogun-ri though.

What may explain the stafing stories by the refugees is that they are confusing dates. They may have been injured by a strafing run by US aircraft on a different date than July 26th at Nogun-ri. Maybe they got strafed on the 24th at an area 5 miles from the Nogun-ri area and are confusing their experience with the Nogun-ri incident. I highly recommend everyone read the US Army report on this because the report definitely makes a strong case against a strafing on 26JUL as the refugees claim.

Secretary of Defense, William Cohen briefs reporters on the findings of the Nogun-ri Investigation.

FACT #4: There was not 400 people killed at Nogun-ri that day.

Here is an interesting excerpt from the official US Army report about how part of the total number of victims from the Nogun-ri tragedy was determined by the claimants:

In August 1950, an Im Gae Ri village official reported the number of dead as 120. He made this report to the North Korean People’s Army on August 7- 8, 1950 at their request. He arrived at that estimate by subtracting the number of villagers who returned to the village from the number of villagers who left.

So naturally the people who didn’t return to the village must of have been killed by those Americans at Nogun-ri. They couldn’t have resettled some where else, or been forced to join the ROK or North Korean Armies, killed by advancing North Koreans, or were killed some where else in Korea. No they must of been killed by the soldiers at Nogun-ri. This just leads me to believe that anyone who didn’t have a relative return from the war at this time near this area just assumes they must have been killed by the Americans and keeps jumping on the bandwagon that keeps causing the casualty estimates to rise.

Why not when there is $400 million dollars involved. What is even more stunning is that the original AP story relies on a North Korean news report to back up their story. Yes, you heard me right a North Korean news report. We all know how fair and balanced and reliable they are (sarcasm). Here is the quote from the original AP article:

Early on July 29, the 7th Cavalry pulled back. North Korean troops who moved in found “about 400 bodies of old, and young people and children,” the North Korean newspaper Cho Sun In Min Bo reported three weeks later.

Folks this is how the body count mythology started. You keep saying the same thing over and over again that 400 people were killed and back it up with scrupulous sources and soon people consider it to be a fact. So where are all these bodies?

This is what the official US report on the incident states:

Based on the available evidence, the U.S. Review Team cannot determine the numbers killed or injured in the vicinity of No Gun Ri. However, the U.S. Review Team concluded that it is unlikely that hundreds of dead bodies were present in the vicinity of No Gun Ri during the last week of July 1950, based on the testimony of U.S. veterans and the examination of the August 6, 1950 aerial photography.

This is what the ROK investigators think:

According to the ROK Review Team, only a small number of bodies or identified graves can be accounted for because: • Many bodies were not buried in marked graves. Korean burial customs at that time were that children and unmarried minors were buried in unmarked graves. Many of the refugees were reported to have been children and unmarried minors. Some gravesites have not been maintained because all descendants of the family have died. The bodies of strangers and the bodies of refugees whose entire family died were left untouched until August 10, 1950. After that date, they were buried in a mass grave, which has been disturbed in the intervening years by family members searching for bodies and farming activity in the area. When farmers uncovered bones, they removed and disposed of bones.

Now with all these dead bodies everywhere wouldn’t somebody have found these mass graves by now? It shouldn’t be to hard to find. They have to be buried near by because aerial reconnaissance photos taken just days later showed no signs of 400 dead bodies much less mass graves. Plus if the bodies of strangers were left untouched until 10AUG1950 then why didn’t the recon photos show the bodies? So these people criticizing the US Army, if they are serious about their claims they should start excavating around the area. Look for these bodies. They must be there somewhere if the 400 bodies ever existed at all.

FACT #5: There were people with weapons intermingled with the civilians.

Once the civilians began moving forward towards the American lines, mortars were fired as warning shots towards the civilians to get them to disperse and move away from the front lines since they were moving at a restricted time without a Korean police escort. The mortars landed in front of the civilians they took cover and then continued forward. More mortars were fired and some of these mortars ended up hitting some of the civilians.

This may explain the air strike stories as being in fact mortars but according to witnesses that have since been proven to be at the scene that day the mortars killed only a handful of people, not 100-150 claimed to be killed by aircraft strafing by the victims groups. Why somebody would use mortars which are not exactly an extremely accurate weapon for a warning shot is something I can see people fairly criticizing because that was definitely a poor decision. But if they focus on that then that debuncts the aircraft story which could of caused in theory 100-150 casualties compared to a mortar strike which couldn’t cause that many casualties because there are to many witnesses who were there that verify it. So best to stick with the aircraft story. After all there is $400 million dollars on the line.

If you wonder why I keep bringing up the $400 million dollar remark it is because the AP didn’t in their original article. It just seems like a pertinent piece of information that should have been included in the original article. Anyway, after the mortar strike the civilians got up and continued moving forward towards the front lines. Then another order was given to fire over the heads of the civilians to get them to turn around. Once again this is verified by witnesses that were there. However, some of the soldiers down the line saw the firing of the other soldiers at the refugees not realizing that they were firing over there heads because they never had the order relayed to them. Better trained soldiers would not have fired without orders from a superior, but there was no superiors to keep the edgy enlisted men in check.

When this happened two gun men in the group of the civilians began firing back at the soldiers. According to witnesses that were there people just started yelling to shoot them they have weapons and everyone on the line then began firing at the group of refugees which caused the killing of the civilians. One veteran even admitted to shooting a young girl. He said that everyone else started to fire so he did to hitting the little girl. This was probably a chain reaction down the line of people just joining in and firing after the first batch of soldiers shot at the enemy with weapons.

Witnesses that were proven to be at the scene that day say they took fire from the refugees plus two weapons were recovered from the scene that were documented on unit supply and S4 logs as having been recovered. Then to top it off a South Korean forensics team discovered shell casings from the two enemy weapons at the scene along with rounds from the Americans weapons. No other battle took place at the bridge during the Korean War leaving the Nogun-ri incident as the likely time that the shell casings were discharged at the site. If you discount all the veteran’s testimony and judge the forensic evidence, it is highly likely that there wer gunmen in the group of refugees.

Now who were the gunmen in the group? They probably were not North Korean soldiers. A likely scenario according to Bateman is that they were South Korean communist guerrilla fighters. Nogun-ri and the surrounding area just a month before the war started was the scene of guerrilla warfare between communist loyalists and the ROK military. No one in the Cav realized this at the time so many of the reports of enemy infiltrators with the civilians may be inaccurate because they may have confused them with actual South Korean guerrilla fighters.

The fact that there was South Korean communist guerrillas is a source of embarrassment for Korea and is not widely publicized. In fact for years after the Korean War the ROK military had to conduct operations in the southern portion of the peninsula to eliminate the last communist hideouts. There are more facts to this case but this is just a sampling of the most pertinent ones. Robert Bateman’s book Nogun-ri provides many hard facts about the incident that cannot be disputed and compares them to the AP journalists’ book The Bridge at Nogun-ri. Read both books and compare the facts before you believe the myths.

Tomorrow: Aftermath of Nogun-ri

Almost from the moment the 7th Cavalry regiment unloaded their boats and moved out of Pohang to fight the North Koreans the stragglers of soldiers from the 24th Infantry Division who had been defeated by the North Koreans, and who were retreating South told tales of how the North Koreans were dressing up as civilians to enter the rear areas of the American units to the 7th Cav soldiers. Here is this report from Robert Bateman’s book, Nogun-ri, that chronicles this fear:

… a civilian woman who appeared pregnant and her male companion who were attempting to pass through American lines. At an American checkpoint there were stopped and searched along with other civilians in the group. At that point the searchers discovered that the pregnancy was not real , and that the bulge covered by the woman’s clothing was actually a two way tactical radio. The woman immediately confessed that she was North Korean and was sent to observe and report American positions and to call for artillery fire on them.

Then reports of American GI’s in the rear found with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head began to circulate among the soldiers as well. Long before the 7th Cav had ever reached their defensive positions near Hwanggan there had been plenty of warning about the dangers of letting refugees through the front lines. This was something that was in the back of all the soldiers minds more than the North Korean Army they had yet to face.

The night of 25-26 July, 1950 these inexperienced soldiers would have their first experience with what is know as the “bug out” syndrome that happened to US soldiers in the early days of the Korean War. At about 0200 that night one of the last elements of the 24ID that was lost and unaccounted for finally found the proper road to retreat south on. This unit included a company of tanks. The road they moved south on went right through the 7th Cav’s defensive lines.

It was dark, their was no night vision devices back then, no communications with anyone in the 24ID, lack of combat experience, and just plain fear that caused the soldier of the 7th Cavalry to open up fire on the American unit. The 24ID unit just simply drove through the hail of gun fire and continued their retreat south not really knowing who was firing on them. Fortunately no one from the unit was killed.

Many soldiers of the 7th Cavalry thought that the retreating company of tanks was in fact a North Korean armored column moving through their lines and opened fire. Experienced NCO’s could of detected the sound of the tanks as American tanks and not North Korean tanks, but remember all the experienced NCO’s from the division got pulled in Japan weeks prior, to serve with the 24ID, leaving the 7th Cavalry with no experienced NCO’s. Remember there was Private First Classes serving as Platoon Sergeants. The now, even more frightful soldiers, were thinking that the North Koreans were in their rear waiting to kill them and many soldiers just simply “bugged out” after the tanks passed and left their fighting positions and retreated. Nobody in the infantry likes to have tanks in front of them much less behind them as well.

CPT Melbourne Chandler the commander of H/2-7CAV was able to consolidate some of his retreating troops and other stragglers of the 7th Cavalry in the predawn darkness to form a defensive line with this hodgepodge of troops. The defensive perimeter was set up on a small hill overlooking a bridge near a place called Nogun-ri.

Tomorrow: What Happened at Nogun-ri?

North Korea is reported to be asking the United States to remove all it’s nuclear weapons from the peninsula before the North Koreans would get rid of theirs. The United States has no nuclear weapons currently in Korea because the US can destory North Korea quite easily with nuclear weapons from forward deployed submarines. The US does not need fixed sites in South Korea.

However, South Korea has a plan to meet the North Korean demands:

Both Washington and Seoul deny there are any U.S. nuclear weapons in the South, and South Korea has earlier raised the possibility of opening South Korean and U.S. bases for some form of verification of that fact by the North.

Now that would be something to see, these North Korean inspectors poking around looking for nuclear weapons on Camp Casey.

Before the outbreak of the Korean War the soldiers involved in the tragedy at Nogun-ri, soldiers from H Company, 2 Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment which were part of the 1st Cavalry Divison, were stationed in Japan conducting peacekeeping operations in the aftermath of World War II. Due to budgetary reasons most of the resources for training soldiers at the combined arms level were diverted to Europe because of the looming Soviet threat there. No one ever envisioned a war in Korea. This lack of vision would become one of many factors that led to the tragedy at Nogun-ri.

The soldiers of the 7th Cavalry did not train at anything above the company level and spent much of their time conducting occupation related duties, not to mention hanging out at the local clubs at all hours of the night. Plus the units were all short of personnel especially noncommissioned officers (NCOs) to keep the Army divisions in Europe fully manned against the more immediate Soviet threat there. The 7th Cavalry was full of young, patriotic, soldiers who grew up on John Wayne movies and were eager to serve their country. However the majority of these young soldiers were not old enough to have served during World War II and lacked combat experience.

There were a few NCOs and officers in the unit that did have combat experience. However, when the war in Korea did break out the experienced NCOs from the 7th Cavalry were pulled to fill units from the 24th Infantry Division that were the first division in Japan to deploy to Korea to delay the North Korean advance that included units such as Task Force Smith which was featured in an earlier Focus On series.

Once it came time for the 1st Cavalry Division to deploy to Korea, it was deployed in piece meal and not as a complete division due to the nature of limited ports in Korea and the division being spread out all over Japan due to occupation duties. So when the 2-7 Cav’s transport from Japan arrived in Korea on July 22, 1950 they were acting semi-autonomous from the division command structure they were used to, plus they were about to undertake operations they had never trained for because they had never done any training above the company level and were about to undertake operations in a major theater war that featured many uncontemporary operating environment problems such as security in the rear areas and a massive refugee crisis no one had any prior experience or training in to deal with. They were literally making up doctrine as they went through trial and error. To make matters worse they were short NCO’s across the regiment that enforce standards. It was so bad that there was some Private First Classes serving as Platoon Sergeants. The officer ranks weren’t much better as the battalion only had one officer with combat experience at the time and that was the commander of G company, 2-7 Cav, CPT Henry West.

This lack of inexperience and training would all have a part to play in the tragedy that would occur four days later.

Tomorrow: From Pohang to Nogun-ri

Unification Minister Chung Dong-young is at it yet again. Chung who is South Korea’s official Kim Jong Il butt kisser and bribe giver to ensure unification doesn’t happen some how feels his position gives him the authority to open his big mouth and bash the US whenever he feels like it. Here is his latest rant:

“A hundred years ago, the Philippines became a U.S. colony and the Korean Peninsula a Japanese one owing to the Taft-Katsura Agreement” of 1905, Chung said. “The division of the nation and Korean War were not our will either,” nor was the failure of the Gwangju Uprising. A century later, Chung promised “a hot summer in which our fate will be decided not by North Korea, China, the United States, Japan or Russia, but by our own pride and self-determination.”

This guy blames the US for the Japanese colonization of Korea, the Korean War, and the Gwangju Uprising. He might as well blame America for Dokto while he is at it too.

First of all, how is the US to blame for the Japanese occupation? Is it not Korea’s responsibility to defend their own country from the Japanese? It is not America’s fault that Korean society was so fractured between the Yangban and peasant classes and that the royal leadership was so ineffective. This all contributed to Korea’s isolationist policies that prevented the country from modernizing and having effective control of the country. This allowed Korea to become easy prey for outside powers like the Japanese. Chung must of forgot it was America that freed this country in 1945 from the Japanese. Korea didn’t do that.

Secondly, how is the Korean War anyone elses fault when Kim Il Sung is the one who pleaded with Stalin to allow him to go to war. The war actually would of started sooner if Stalin didn’t keep delaying Kim to make sure that America would not respond. Last I checked Kim Il Sung was Korean and it was a Korean civil war thus making it a Korean caused problem. It took 32,000+ American lives to correct this problem. Chung forgets that too.

Finally, the Gwangju Uprising has nothing to do with the US. This was a Korean internal dispute but some people like to bash the US for the harsh crackdown because the US military did nothing to stop it. I would not feel comfortable as a soldier being put into a situation like Gwangju where you have no idea what is going on and may have to engage ROK soldiers. In a situation like that the US military would probably do more harm than good. But once again you had Koreans shooting Koreans, how is that America’s fault?

Chung is trying to play to Korean nationalism by continuously blaming foreign countries for all of Korea’s problem and taking credit for things that he feels Korea accomplished independently when in fact America is partly responsible for the success of this country. Here is the reason he is playing to Korean nationalism:

Chung also asked the Uri Party to double inter-Korean cooperation funds, which currently stand at W500 billion (US$487 million) a year.

That is a lot more money he can give to Kim Jong Il. I wonder how much of that Chung gets to keep?

Anyway I hope someone at the US Embassy calls out Chung publicly on his statements. I get tired of the US government sitting back and taking this crap, which is sadly what we will probably do yet again. I wish someone would get this guy to shut his mouth for once.

Check out The Marmot for some more great commentary on this as well.

Yesterday, at Haeundae Beach in Pusan.

How do people find this relaxing, hanging out with 800,000 other people?

Andy over at Flying Yangban pointed out this article in the Chosun Ilbo that featured the below photograph:

The picture is supposed to be of a sandstorm hitting the Korean Zaytun unit’s base in Irbil, in Northern Iraq. However, Andy points out that this picture is not from the Korean base in Irbil but of Al Asad Airbase in Western Iraq. Here are some more pictures of the sandstorm:

This pictures bring back memories of my time in Iraq. This is how the sandstorms looked like though I remember them being darker then the reddish color in the pictures. Could be because of the sunset. These sandstorms looked like something straight out of The Mummy. When my men and I first saw a sandstorm or in Arabic, Shumali, heading straight for us we just kind of glanced at each other in disbelief wondering if this was natural or not? Everything was perfectly calm as the storm approached. However, once it hit you the calm instantly disappeared and all hell breaks loose as any exposed skin you may have begins to feel like it is being pricked by needles. You must have eye protection to see or you risk blinding your eyes. We actually had people get lost, wandering around in these sandstorms when they had to go to the bathroom. The shumali that hit during the combat phase of the war even had a name given to it by the GI’s, a MOASS (mother of all sandstorms).

This is one GI who will never complain about monsoon season or the heat here Korea this time of year, because trust me, I have been through worse.

Courtesy of the Budaechigae via the Infidel is this picture of ROK Army soldiers:

No that is not water they are washing their faces with, but feces from the cans at the bottom of outhouses. I further checked out the link where this picture came from and I found even more interesting pictures:

I don’t know where these pictures came from or how old they are, just that they were published on the above link from some Japanese guy named Suika Dorobo. They don’t appeared to be staged or Photoshopped either. If anyone can tell by looking at the pictures how old they are or if these are real photographs, please feel free to comment.

However, maybe the next time someone in Korea takes a cheap shot at the US military over Abu Graib, they will think twice about it instead.

I sure hope that this is not the next Japanese cultural transfer from Japan to Korea. On second thought maybe this isn’t such a bad idea? Wouldn’t this leave more girls here for the rest of the guys not in love with a doll?