No Gun Ri Massacre - Enough Already

The question about the massacre at No Gun Ri has come up again. What are we to believe?

Civilians are killed in wars and an awful lot of civilians were killed in the Korean War because, if for no other reason, the war moved so quickly up and down the peninsula, forcing refugees, displacing persons, and mingling persons of the North and the South. Soldiers hid among the civilians, weapons and supplies were moved by civilians, and on more than one occasion seeming civilians opened fire on UN troops.

There is a good chance civilians were killed at No Gun Ri, and three dozen other places. The effort to turn it in to some sort of massacre requires us to pretend we have knowledge that we do not have; who were the people, what had been happening just before, and what price had the involved units been paying from the presence of "civilians."

The saying when I was there was that you could tell the difference between Communist and Republic troops by watching which way they were running; the North Koreans were running after you and the South Koreans were running with you. Give it a break!

Senior Fellow, Paul Edwards