The horror, the horror

Civilian massacres like My Lai and No Gun Ri are inevitable in the exceptionally ruthless Western way of war. So why can't we just face up to it?

By Judith Greer

Sept. 10, 2001 |

The sixteen-year-old clawed away at bodies, pulling aside arms and legs to hide herself beneath the dead. "I could hear blood flowing down, the sound of blood gurgling out of the bodies," she remembered. Her throat was burning; she gulped down what she found on the floor. "I drank like a mad person ... The horrible thing was that blood kept flowing down from the bodies above me. So I couldn't really tell whether I drank blood or water."

There are a lot of ways to tell the story of human warfare, and each will tend to give us a different view of when, how and why we should go to war. One way, almost guaranteed to make a knee-jerk anti-war activist out of any reader, is the personal, face-down-in-the-dirt testimonial, like that quoted above, of Park Hee-Sook, a bewildered South Korean refugee featured in "The Bridge at No Gun Ri" by Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Chose and Martha Mendoza. In July 1950 Hee-sook was forced out of her home by American soldiers, strafed and rocketed by American aircraft on the road she was directed to take and then pinned down by American sniper fire under a concrete railroad trestle for three days amidst the bodies of her dead and dying family and friends.

Another way to frame the narrative of war is by rational analysis -- or rationalization -- of the factors that lead to success or failure in combat. This kind of treatment flings aside the question of why or whether war should be initiated, and concentrates instead on how it is won. Military historian Victor Davis Hanson, in his new book "Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power," gives us the vulture's eye view: vast panoramas of hacked, charred, and waterlogged bodies are essentially abstracted to putrefying rectangles on battlefield maps, picked over to illustrate the clear superiority of Western cultural values when it comes to the prosecution of successful bloodbaths.

Hanson's view in "Carnage and Culture" is grim but elevated, because he claims to believe that Western military dominance has nothing to do with morality. Instead, he insists that the West has usually achieved its goals in war because its methodology is so seldom shackled by any consideration other than military necessity. While it graphically describes many military events, his book remains a kind of aerial survey of the landscape of war, one in which Hanson, according to the New York Times' review of the book, "more than makes his case" that a uniquely Western ruthlessness, spawned by uniquely Western cultural values, has led to a world in which Western military forces reign supreme.

In "The Bridge at No Gun Ri," on the other hand, the story takes us down onto the killing fields for days at a time, sharing the wartime experiences of individuals. So we find ourselves cowering with them in a pitch-black ditch to avoid a ferocious rain of "friendly fire," or watching as another young woman, Yang Hae-sook, plucks her own dangling eyeball off the string of her nerves.

"The Bridge at No Gun Ri" is an expanded version of a Pulitzer Prize-winning story about the large-scale massacre in 1950 of unarmed South Korean civilians by U.S. troops, a story broken by a team of Associated Press investigative reporters in 1999. The slaughter was just one part of the hot, sweating military debacle that unfolded during the first few desperate weeks of the Korean War. As their communist North Korean opponents drove them relentlessly backward down the Korean peninsula from Seoul, the inexperienced American troops and their Republic of Korea allies retreated to what they hoped would be a defensible corner of the country called the "Pusan Perimeter." With them and behind them was a displaced and panicky civilian populace, many of whom had been driven from their villages.

Next page: Civilians shot down by their "protectors"