The horror, the horror

The Garryowens' first night in the combat zone wasn't much more commendable. Cooked by the tropical heat, eaten by rice-paddy mosquitoes, revolted by the smell of human excrement used in the fields and primed with lurid tales of sneak attacks, infiltration and atrocities, the Garryowens dug in a few miles behind the front, which was slowly being withdrawn from the environs of the town of Yongdong, captured that day by the North Koreans. As soon as darkness fell, the nervous soldiers began shooting at anything that moved or made a sound. One second lieutenant was killed by his own troops when he lit a cigarette in view of the raw, jittery kids in their foxholes.

Meanwhile, several miles away on the Yongdong road, Park Hee-Sook, Yang Hae-sook and their families were being rousted out of their villages by other Americans attempting to clear the area between the armies, to create what was to become known as a "free fire zone" in another conflict a generation later.

In the wee hours of the next night, the Garryowens were ordered to pull back toward No Gun Ri in a routine maneuver designed to straighten and strengthen their front line. But when the order reached the anxious company commanders, they thought it meant there had been a North Korean breakthrough and that they were in danger of being overrun. Soon a mad, blundering fire fight broke out in the inky blackness between two different units of the American forces who each thought they had encountered the enemy. A story circulated amid the melie that the refugees and their carts and oxen, which the Americans could hear moving behind them as they withdrew, were either actual enemy troops and tanks or a shield of civilians being deliberately pushed forward in front of advancing North Korean troops.

As morning dawned, the crowd of refugees, under a small American escort, was approaching the "exhausted, unnerved and hungry" Garryowens, who had settled in on the heights at either side of the road that paralleled the rail line coming east from Yongdong. Orders had been sent down two days earlier from Division headquarters. "No refugees to cross the front line," the order read. "Fire everyone trying to cross lines. Use discretion in case of women and children."

Most commanders, however, had heard the same stories Gil Huff, the regiment's executive officer did, over and over again. Refugee women, it was rumored, were being caught with weapons and radios hidden in their supposedly pregnant bellies or under the babies on their backs. "I never saw one," Huff said later. "But it makes a good story, a colorful story." In any case, it was one that was certainly believed by the skittish recruits at No Gun Ri.

The Air Force was not invited to make exceptions for women and children as they saw fit. Their pilots had been ordered to fire on all refugee parties approaching American positions, whenever they were seen and whoever they might be. Turner Rogers, operations chief of the 5th Air Force, had his doubts about the policy. His fliers were complying, he wrote in a July 25 letter to his superior, but the carnage was likely to attract unwanted press attention sooner or later, and that could prove "embarrassing." Furthermore, Rogers was annoyed that the Army was not taking care of the problem of refugees themselves, on the ground. He couldn't understand why they weren't "screening such personnel or shooting them as they come through if they desire such action." Besides, Rogers, said, there were many targets of much greater military utility that the Air Force should be addressing instead.

But the policy was still in place on July 26, 1950, when, according to witnesses, U.S. planes either strafed or dive-bombed the refugee column as it rested near the railroad bridge at No Gun Ri. On the higher ground above the crossing, the stressed-out Garryowens apparently took the Air Force attack, and the refugees' mass flight toward the relative shelter of the high tunnels of the bridge, as the signal to fire -- and keep firing -- on the bleeding, hysterical, screaming crowd.

The Americans escorting the refugees were caught in the crossfire, too, and several of them took shelter with some of the terrified refugees in a small culvert not far from the railway. Somebody starting firing in at them. "It was like a hornet's nest in there," said Pfc. Delos Flint. "One of my buddies got hit. Shot off part of his privates. Hurt him bad. We was in there hours."

Next page: No such thing as "civilized" warfare