For Koreans, Vietnam War Wounds Heal Slowly
Pacific News Service, News Feature, Ngoc Nguyen, Posted: Sep 18, 2003
Editor's Note: Once Korea's forgotten war, the Vietnam War is looming large in the South Korean consciousness.
SEOUL, South Korea--Between 1965 and 1970, more than 310,000 Korean soldiers fought in the Vietnam War, the largest foreign contingent after American troops. At the height of the war in 1969, 50,000 Korean combat soldiers were stationed in Vietnam, outnumbering even North Vietnamese troops. More than 5,000 South Korean lives were lost.
Yet for decades, Vietnam remained Korea's forgotten war. Now, however, the country's collective memory of its involvement in Vietnam is slowly, painfully surfacing.
Kim Young Man fought alongside U.S. troops in Vietnam. While American forces provided artillery backup, Korean soldiers like Kim were stationed on the front lines. His job was to keep allied forces alive by killing as many of the enemy as possible.
Today, interviewed by telephone, Kim struggles to talk about killing Vietnamese during the battle.
"War is not a game," he says. "We fought. We killed people, what else should I say?" Kim speaks softly, gets choked up, breaks off the conversation several times and then calls back.
Living with decades of guilt, Kim says it took him a long time to admit Korean soldiers had massacred thousands of Vietnamese, including civilians.
"We had the pride of joining the war for a long time," says Kim. "That's why most veterans exaggerate or boast the Vietnam War experience rather than reflect that war is fundamentally wrong and we did something wrong there."
Kim now works for a group that promotes unification of North and South Korea. A few years ago, he penned a letter of apology to the Vietnamese people for war crimes committed by Korean soldiers during the Vietnam War, and sent it to Korea's largest progressive daily, Hankyoreh, which published it.
Kim never asked other soldiers to write the paper, but confession letters from other Korean Vietnam War veterans soon poured in. Hankyoreh published more and more letters from veterans, and with the help of peace activists the series blossomed into a larger campaign called, "Thanh that xin loi, Vietnam" (We are deeply sorry, Vietnam).
The reconciliation campaign proved unpopular among many Korean veterans. Shortly after it started, thousands of veterans stormed the offices of the newspaper. Many believe they risked their lives in Vietnam defending democracy, and consider the letter-writers apologists.
Chong Kyung Jin was a company commander in the Marine Corps in Vietnam. He was awarded a Silver Star by the U.S. military for killing more than 30 North Vietnamese soldiers in a single day.
"Communism was expanding in Asia," he says. "If U.S. soldiers didn't attack, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines would be communist countries today. We prevented that from happening."
Until 1988, Korea was ruled by a succession of military dictatorships that buried the memory of Korean involvement in Vietnam. The Korean government also preferred not to admit it had received economic payoffs for assisting the United States in Vietnam.
The United States saved about $8,000 per solider per year by paying Korean soldiers to fight instead of American ones -- a savings of $2.5 billion dollars over eight years -- and it promised $1 billion dollars to the South Korean government. Han Hong Koo teaches modern Korean history at Sungkonghoe University. He says the money gave South Korea a big economic boost at a time when the country needed to rebuild. South Korean companies were awarded reconstruction contracts to build roads and bridges in Vietnam. Korea was also able to boost exports of electronics. Both factors helped lay the groundwork for the country's current economy.
The turning point in Korean consciousness about Vietnam, Han says, occurred in September 1999, and involved a different war. The Associated Press published an investigative story about the No Gun Ri massacre, in which American soldiers fired machine guns at Korean refugees taking shelter under a bridge during the Korean War. More than 100 civilians were reportedly killed.
"What happened in No Gun Ri and what happened in Vietnam were the same thing," Han says. "It was the massacre of civilians by soldiers. In act one we were the victims, and in act two we were the victimizers.
"We Koreans had an image of ourselves as peace-loving people, but for the first time that image was shattered."
Han says for a long time Korean history books neglected to tell the story of Korean mercenaries during the Vietnam War, in the same way the Japanese distorted the history of its half-century colonial rule over Korea.
"We were seriously angry about that, but we did the same thing. Of course, what we did in Vietnam was smaller in scale and shorter in time span than what the Japanese did to us, but even if we do not intend to provide sincere apology to the Vietnamese people, how can we ask the Japanese government to apologize to us?"
PNS contributor Ngoc Nguyen (ngocious@yahoo.com) is a freelance writer and is currently training journalists in Asia.
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