Thanks to the Bass Hole for pointing out this stupid foreigner trick:

A Korean broke into a bank in Hamburg, Germany and held hostages for three hours before he was arrested by German special police on July 28, according to the internet edition of a German daily paper, Build.

The Korean, identified only as K, entered the Sparkasse bank in Alsdorf, Hamburg at 7:50 a.m. and confronted police, taking two female hostages, before he was arrested by police MEK (Mobiles Einsatzkommando), the newspaper said. The hostages were released right before the police began rescue operations.

What nothing about “running amok” in the article? Is that terminology only for taxi cab related incidents and not bank robberies?

Korean female golfers continue to excel as Jeong Jang won the LPGA British Open:

Savoring her first victory since her debut on the LPGA tour six years ago, Jang became the fourth Korean golfer to win a major tournament after Park Se-ri, Grace Park and Birdie Kim. She is the second Korean to take the British Open, following Park Se-ri’s 2001 victory.

That’s not mention Korean-American phenom Michelle Wie who continues to impress. Anyone got opinions on why Korean female golfers perform so well?

Korea’s popular citizen news service, Oh My News, recently published their own version of what happened at Nogun-ri. It is safe to say that this article of “journalism” or should I say docu-fiction tends to focus more on fantasy then the actual facts. Take this passage here as the first example:

Once the story broke and grabbed headline attention, the victims began to step forward. The Seoul government was placed between a rock and a hard place. Continuing to muzzle the victims would strengthen the notion that the Seoul government was a mere puppet of Uncle Sam. After all, its main reason for suppressing the story was to please him.

What evidence does the author, a Mr. Young Kim offer that the Korean government was trying to suppress the story because of pressure from the US? He has no evidence. Also how is this considered journalism? Sounds like propaganda to me. But wait there is more:

The massacre of innocent civilians by American troops was, of course, well-known among the victims and their relatives, but the Seoul government had for years labeled anyone mentioning the massacre “communists,” and brutally prosecuted them. Ironically, it took a fair-minded American journalist to disclose the massacre.

Once again he provides no evidence of his claims and then calls the AP reporters “fair minded” when the principle source of their reporting Edward Daily was uncovered as a liar by US News and World Report and the Stars and Stripes newspaper through simple background checks of Daily’s past these real journalists uncovered that Daily wasn’t even a combat arms soldier, did not earn the awards he claimed to have won, and wasn’t even anywhere near Nogun-ri at the time of the incident. Daily wasn’t the only one. Other veterans that made key claims about Nogun-ri were later found to have not even been there. Then according to Robert Bateman’s Book, Nogun-ri, the lead AP reporter Charles Hanley admitted to the discrepancies in the veterans stories but ran with the article anyway. There was a Pulitzer Prize to think about.

Some how Kim failed to mention all this in his article. Then the claim that this was covered up for decades is absolutely false. In Bateman’s book he provides articles from major US newspapers such as the New York Times that documents the killing of civilians by US soldiers during the Korean War. This is not new news but the story needs the air of a great government cover up to catch the readers attention. Then Kim goes on to try and use the Pentagon investigative report of the incident as evidence that the US soldiers blatantly killed the refugees. Here is the excerpt from the Pentagon report he used:

The Korean villagers stated that on July 25, 1950, U.S. soldiers evacuated approximately 500 to 600 villagers from their homes in Im Gae Ri and Joo Gok Ri. The villagers said the U.S. soldiers escorted them towards the south. Later that evening, the American soldiers led the villagers near a riverbank at Ha Ga Ri and ordered them to stay there that night. During the night, the villagers witnessed a long parade of U.S. troops and vehicles moving towards Pusan. On the morning of July 26, 1950, the villagers continued south along the Seoul-Pusan road. According to their statements, when the villagers reached the vicinity of No Gun Ri, U.S. soldiers stopped them at a roadblock and ordered the group onto the railroad tracks, where the soldiers searched them and their personal belongings. The Koreans state that, although the soldiers found no prohibited items (such as weapons or other military contraband), the soldiers ordered an air attack on the villagers by radio communications with U.S. aircraft. Shortly afterwords, planes flew over and dropped bombs and fired machine guns, killing about 100 villagers on the railroad tracks. Those villagers who survived sought protection in a small culvert underneath the railroad tracks. The U.S. soldiers drove the villagers out of the culvert and into the larger double tunnels nearby (this report subsequently refers to these tunnels as the “double railroad overpass”). The Koreans state the U.S. soldiers then fired into both ends of the tunnels over four days (July 26-29, 1950), resulting in approximately 300 additional deaths.

If you notice in this excerpt this is all the claims made by the refugees that Army logged in their report, not the findings of the actual report. If you notice he makes no references to the claims of what happened made by the soldiers that were there. If Kim was a real journalist he would of read more from the report especially the interviews with the soldiers. In Chapter 5, of Robert Bateman’s book, No Gun Ri he quotes interviews from soldiers who were at Nogun-ri. The US-ROK report doesn’t state that soldiers evacuate the villagers. It stated that it was possible but unlikely:

While the U.S. Review Team cannot rule out the possibility that the movement of the villagers occurred as described by the Korean witnesses, there was no sound military reason for soldiers to travel approximately three miles off their designated movement route to the village of Im Gae Ri during a hasty withdrawal for the purpose of encouraging an additional 400 refugees onto the already crowded roads and aggravating further the congested conditions. It is also unlikely that the soldiers would have performed this evacuation given the widespread knowledge and fear of North Korean infiltrators believed to be present in refugee concentrations.

The reason for wanting to keep refugees away from the front line was because North Korean soldiers had been infiltrating into the Americans rear areas by posing as civilians. Why would these US soldiers in a desperate retreat go so far out of there way to evacuate a Korean village to further fill the US frontlines with civilians? It makes no sense.

A lesser known fact was that the area around the villages of Yongdong and Nogun-ri were filled with South Korean communist sympathizers that were actively ambushing American soldiers in the area. In fact just weeks before the start of the Korean War an entire ROK Army division was in this area battling the communist insurgents. Then the accounts of the aircraft strike are easily proven to be inaccurate due to veteran testimony and aerial recon photographs.

I could go on and on dispelling Mr. Kim’s myths but please read my complete Focus On: No Gun Ri series for a complete factual analysis of what happened instead of Mr. Kim’s mythology. There was a tragedy at Nogun-ri, know doubt about it. Civilians were killed by US soldiers. I don’t dispute that. What I do dispute is the factors that caused it and the numbers of civilians killed. The anti-American crowd like Mr. Kim wants you to believe that these soldiers were cold heartless killers just waiting to kill helpless Korean refugees under orders from their uncaring commanding general, so the US Army wouldn’t have to deal with the refugee problem anymore.

This is the mythology Mr. Kim and his ilk are pushing and they are winning this information battle. I am willing to bet most Americans and Koreans believe Mr. Kim’s version of events. That is the continuing tragedy of this incident. The advocacy journalism these reporters are using to push their anti-military or in the case of Mr. Kim, anti-USFK agendas is truly disturbing. They are actively wanting to smear the honor of aged veterans who sacrificed their youth to save Korea from communism.

It is bad enough the Korean War is considered the Forgotten War in America but now it is becoming the Revised War in an effort to smear the veterans and in turn Americans themselves. Oh My News is an interesting outlet for citizen journalism but it is becoming citizen propaganda instead. Isn’t there editors that check what is being posted? How am I supposed to take an article from Oh My News seriously in the future when they let such propaganda as Mr. Kim’s article be reported? I exposed this guy in 15 minutes of typing. Shouldn’t journalists have some kind of responsibility to verify facts before reporting a story? If Oh My News doesn’t believe in checking the credibility of a story than they need to change their name to Oh My Tabloid News. At least then they are being intellectually honest.

For more about Mr. Young Kim you can check out his Kimsoft site and draw your own conclusions about if he has an anti-USFK agenda or not.

The Mudville Gazette has a great posting in response to a New York Times article that compares the US military to a bunch of mercenaries. Here is some selected quotes from Mr. David Kennedy’s article:

The United States now has a mercenary army. To be sure, our soldiers are hired from within the citizenry, unlike the hated Hessians whom George III recruited to fight against the American Revolutionaries. But like those Hessians, today’s volunteers sign up for some mighty dangerous work largely for wages and benefits – a compensation package that may not always be commensurate with the dangers in store, as current recruiting problems testify.

Leaving questions of equity aside, it cannot be wise for a democracy to let such an important function grow so far removed from popular participation and accountability. It makes some supremely important things too easy – like dealing out death and destruction to others, and seeking military solutions on the assumption they will be swifter and more cheaply bought than what could be accomplished by the more vexatious business of diplomacy….

I like this quote from Greyhawk on this:

He’s right, in a limited way. The American Left is far, far out of touch with the American military. Since the abolition of the draft Leftists don’t serve.

And when an American Leftist says “mainstream American” they mean themselves – exclusively. They are ignorant of the other, much larger segment of society that does not subscribe to their rigid dogma. (This also is helpful in understanding their confusion over the elected government of the nation.)

Basically what Mr. Kennedy is trying to do is continue to beat the liberal drum that the draft should be reinstated. They want the draft reinstated not because they actually care about everyone participating in the defense of this country, but because it would be political suicide for the Republicans and the Bush administration to do so. What I find really interesting about this arguement is that these same liberals are the ones who fought against the draft during the Vietnam War and now want to bring it back the draft when they are to old serve.

Wonder if my extra $300 bucks a month AIP puts me in the Hessian Mercenary tax bracket?

Was an Al Qaeda operative recently in Korea:

Interpol is trying to determine if a Pakistani man who visited South Korea is a member of the Al Qaeda terror network, local media reported on Friday, citing unidentified government sources.

The Pakistani, 46, visited South Korea from June 23 to July 3 and subsequently received a visa on July 15, numerous media including the Hankyoreh newspaper and YTN television reported, citing South Korea’s National Police Agency and airport officials who are working with Interpol. The man, whose name was not reported, is currently in Malaysia, the reports said.

Who knows if this is true or not, but I hope Korean authorities are taking the allegation seriously and following up on what this guy was doing for those 10 days in Korea. Al Qaeda hasn’t been able to commit a terrorist attack in a northeast Asian country yet and I’m sure they would strike Korea if given the opportunity.

From the Khaleej Times:

A customs official holds clothes hangers that were found to be made out of gold worth 81 million won (US$80,000) at the Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul on Friday. A Taiwan national fabricated the hangers in order to smuggle the metal into South Korea. High taxes on gold sales in South Korea make black market transactions highly profitable. – AP

It should be clear by now for most fair minded people that the incident at Nogun-ri was not a planned execution of Korean civilians. It was the “Perfect Storm” of a multitude of circumstances that ultimately led to killing of the South Korean civilians. First of all there was scared soldiers that had been retreating all night from what they percieved to have been enemy tanks. No one knew that the actual North Korean frontline was actually 15 miles down the road due to the chaos of that night plus the fact the regiment had been operating autonumously due to the piece meal deployment that left them without a division headquarters to relay intelligence information to them.

Secondly the unit had many poorly trained soldiers, who had never done any training above a company level much less training with handling refugees and uncoventional warfare due to the nature of their occupation duties and funding of the division.

Thirdly the 7th Cav was missing adequate leadership due to the few experienced NCO’s they did have being removed from the unit and given to the 24ID.

Also the soldiers at the bridge were not in their typical unit structure due to being a hodgepodge of soldiers pulled from the road to form the defensive line which caused a situation where there was a lot of Indians and not enough Chiefs to relay orders. So an order is put out to shoot above the heads of the civilians and others down the line without the benefit of training and leader supervision also begin to fire.

The final factor that contributed to this was the fact that the refugees were there to begin with. 28 refugees from the village claim they were removed from the village of Imgae-ri by US soldiers. This claim is possibly true as there was US units within three miles of the village at that time. Here is a quote from the US Army Report I found noteworthy:

While the U.S. Review Team cannot rule out the possibility that the movement of the villagers occurred as described by the Korean witnesses, there was no sound military reason for soldiers to travel approximately three miles off their designated movement route to the village of Im Gae Ri during a hasty withdrawal for the purpose of encouraging an additional 400 refugees onto the already crowded roads and aggravating further the congested conditions. It is also unlikely that the soldiers would have performed this evacuation given the widespread knowledge and fear of North Korean infiltrators believed to be present in refugee concentrations.

Let’s assume the village was evacuated by US soldiers, they were wrong to do so. The village should of been evacuated by the Korean National Police who would of then escorted the villagers out of the area. Maybe the US unit didn’t get the message from higher on how to handle evacuating villages and refugees? Who knows this part is lost to history right now. However, whatever happened at Imgae-ri was the final part of the perfect storm that put the villagers on the bridge that day in the line of sights of the hodgepodge of 7th Cav soldiers.

I think it is quite obvious by the evidence that these 7th Cav soldiers were not just sitting on a hill waiting for the next group of helpless refugees to shoot at because they were under orders to do so by some general who just didn’t want to deal with refugees anymore.

I also think that it is obvious that 400 people did not die on the bridge that day. I say a maximum of 50 people died that day. This is still a tremendous amount of civilian casualties that should not be discounted. The only way I can see 400 deaths is from a combined total of deaths of civilians in the area at the time and not just at the bridge. I would buy that 400 civilians died overall in that area between crossfire between the combatants, stafings, and artillery fire. This is highly possible and villagers are just assuming their relatives died at Nogun-ri.

However, why is 400 dead at the bridge brought up over and over again instead of 50 which the facts more heavily favor? 50 is still a horribly large loss of life. It is because 400 deaths are what Pulitzer Prizes are made of and $400 million in compensation money is awarded from.

What is the motivation of the many veterans who lied about their involvement in this tragedy. Maybe some of these people were disgruntled at the military, wanted notariety, or maybe just simply with age do not remember the incident accurately. Money has also been found to be a motivator. However, the lies caught up with one veteran only looking for his payday:

Prosecutors successfully proved to the court that Daily had filed a claim with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on shrapnel injuries he said he received while he was a Korean War veteran. He also claimed POW status. From February 1986 through the end of 2001, Daily received $324,911 in payments wired to his bank, and $87,928 in medical care for service-related disabilities. The war veteran?s fraudulent claims were discovered following a Stars and Stripes investigation of the Associated Press story about Nogun-ri. Investigators with U.S. News also found discrepancies in the testimonies of witnesses named in the Associated Press story. Declassified Army war diaries and other declassified documents showed that Edward Lee Daily was not a member of a 7th Cavalry Regiment line company. Instead, he was a mechanic with the Army?s 27th Ordnance Maintenance Company. Daily?s claim to be a 1st Lieutenant in the Army was also false, according to his own admission in court.

On September 13, 2002, U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger pronounced sentence against Daily. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Daily was sentenced in federal court to 21 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. In addition, Daily must repay the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs $412,839?money which he illegally obtained from the government by wire fraud.

I realize that even with the evidence I have displayed some people will never except the possibility that these soldiers were part of what I term a “Perfect Storm” of circumstances that combined to create this tragedy. Some people will continue to maintain these soldiers are war criminals and were under orders to kill all refugees and whatever else the current mythology preaches. Some will claim that these guys are war criminals because if they had been there that day they wouldn’t have fired. That is an extremely bold statement coming from someone sitting at home. Getting shot at in a war brings a new perspective to things you cannot even understand unless you are there. Watching Saving Private Ryan over and over again doesn’t mean you understand soldiers and the nature of warfare.

Many will also continue to demand compensation for what happened an Nogun-ri. Isn’t the loss of 32,000+ American lives enough compensation to Korea? There is nothing more valuable to a country than their youth, and America gave the lives of 32,000 of their youths plus the ten of thousands of more wounded to give a country no one even heard of before a chance at a better life free from communism. I just hope that fair minded people will give Korean War veterans a chance to restore the honor they have lost by the unfair reporting and sensationalism of this tragedy.

Tomorrow: The Media and Nogun-ri
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I hope I have been able to better educate people that may not know much about the incident to look more into it and to draw their own conclusions because I am quite confident in what I think happened that tragic day in July, 1950. So what do you think? Feel free to place your commetns. Here are some books and links I highly recommend if you have further interest in this topic.

This Kind of War, T.R. Fehrenbach

No Gun Ri, Robert Bateman

The Bridge at No Gun Ri, AP reporters

South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu, Roy Appleman

Official US Army Report on No Gun Ri

Korean War Educator

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

The revisionist history of the Korean War continues:

A Korean professor’s web-based newspaper column is causing controversy after he wrote on Wednesday that without the U.S.’s intervention, the Korean War would have ended earlier and suffered fewer casualties.

Kang Jeong-ku, a sociology professor at Dongguk University, wrote on an Internet newspaper that casualties during the Korean War were so high because U.S. military forces intervened unnecessarily with the civil war and slaughtered innocent civilians.

“If the U.S. had not have intervened in the civil war which was intended to unite the two Koreas … the war would have ended in a month and the causalities would have reached less than 10.000,” Kang wrote on the Daily Surprise.

Anyone now wonder where the youth in this country get such distorted views of the American involvement in the Korean War? The communists have taken over the educational system here. I just love how this guy focuses on the US military’s alleged slaughter of innocent civilians with no mention of similar killings of civilians by both the ROK Army, North Korean Army, Chinese Army, and other international troops in Korea. Once again it is only America that kills civilians.

Actually reading through this article this professor is actually right in part. If the US did not get involved in the Korean War, less people would of died during the war and the peninsula would of been united. Cannot dispute that. Kim Il Sung’s statue would be in Inchon right now instead of MacArthur’s and everyone could be singing their juche love songs to him right now.

However, I am willing to argue that more people would of died over the past 50 years overall since the Korean War due to increased political purges, starvations, and mismanagement of the economy. I wouldn’t call the Juche economy the most successful of economic models. I’m sure that Professor Kang would agree that; that is America’s fault some how too.