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Had she had much experience with topographical maps and coordinates?

"Well, I'm a backpacker," she answers with a laugh.

Working with historians and contemporary accounts, the team determined what units of which companies might have been present. Then, using the Freedom of Information Act, they collected the names of the soldiers in those units. And finally they began to call the soldiers who were still alive, men who were now in their 60s, 70s, even 80s. Mendoza was working at the AP offices in Rockefeller Center then, but she says she always lost her sense of where she was during the interviews. "I wasn't at all convinced that this had happened; there would be many reasons for people in South Korea to describe something like this," Mendoza says now. "So I would call [U.S. servicemen] and explain to them what I was doing. I would lead into it with, 'Now you must have come into it around these dates and did you see civilians?'

"'Well, yeah, we had to shoot 'em all that time at the tunnel.' There responses were like that. 'Yeah, I hated to kill 'em but we had to annihilate 'em.' So people were right there with me."

Piecing together the accounts, the team was able to pinpoint which companies had done most of the shooting. Their accounts mirrored what the Korean survivors had told them -- so much so that the veterans would correct their imprecise questions to more perfectly match the Korean testimony. "I'd say it was at a tunnel and they'd say, 'Ma'am, we didn't do this at a tunnel, we did it at a culvert underneath a railroad, it was M shaped.'" They would take the maps the survivors had drawn from memory and redraw them, placing the troops and weapons differently. "I sat down with a veteran and said, 'Here's where they said the machine guns were,' and he looked at the map and said, 'No, no,' and put an X somewhere else on the map and said, 'Here's where my machine gun was. And I was on it with these two other guys; they're dead now.'"

If doing this reporting, listening to these stories, was an emotional experience for Mendoza and her fellow reporters, it was wrenching for the men she spoke with. Their reactions ran the gamut from guilt to denial to relief. One veteran told her, "Do you realize that I've been a cripple for 50 years? I went to Korea, I got shot and I spent my whole life crippled and you're asking me about shooting civilians. How dare you?"

"And I think that's a very valid attitude to have," she says. "What were they doing fighting over there and spending their lives like this, and not getting compensated themselves? And there were people who said, 'This is my redemption.' It was a religious experience for them to have us call out of the blue and ask them about it."

Most shocking of all, most of these men had never spoken about the massacre to anyone -- not their war buddies, their wives, their families, no one. When interviewing veterans in person, their families would often tell her afterwards that not only had dad never mentioned No Gun Ri, he had never spoken about the Korean War at all. Why no other newspaper or news agency pursued this story with the vigor the AP did is something she will not speculate on. "This is one of many stories," she says. It's 50 years old and it took a lot of work. There's not a report sitting in the National Archives we were able to find about this. It took reconstructing troop movements. It took finding them and talking to them. And listening to them."

Mendoza's beat now is Silicon Alley, where the stories she breaks have to do with Intel and Apple. She's pleased that AP could uncover this story and that the Internet exists to present the evidence, to allow an individual reader to look at the documents she culled and look at the faces of the people who lived this horror. And the press of the 1950s, she likes to point out, had pressures of a different sort. Contemporary accounts referred to rumors of a massacre, including reports in Colliers and the New York Times. But such stories were quickly supplanted by more gung-ho dispatches about the military and the headway it was making in the conflict, as the McCarthy hearings began to question anyone who questioned our engagement with the Red Menace.

Even the My Lai massacre, which was reported (again, after repeated military denials) a year after it occurred in 1968, did not move the veterans of No Run Gi to speak. Many justified their actions, and still do, as part of war's exacting price.

At the time the My Lai story broke, she recalls, "There was a report from a Korean war general who said, 'I don't what the big deal is with My Lai. This is the kind of thing that happens all the time in war.' And these veterans certainly seem to feel that way. I don't know how long it's going to be news in our country, and obviously it still is, but war is absolutely horrendous for the people out there."
salon.com | Sept. 30, 1999

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