No Gun Ri Massacre and the Battle of Changjin Reservoir: the Korean War in Lark and Termite and the Coldest Night

【연구논문】 No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir: The Korean War in Lark and Termite and The Coldest Night Jae Eun Yoo (Hanyang University) A few days after the 9/11 terrorist attack, scholars of history noted, with much concern, a fierce revival of the Cold War rhetoric. This was first observed in President Bush’s speeches and then quickly spread to official government discourses, media, and popular culture. In various studies of the post-9/11 America, historians such as Mary Dudziak, Marilyn Young, Amy Kaplan, Elaine Tyler May, and Bruce Cumings argue that the striking similarity between the rhetoric employed by the Bush administration and the cold war propaganda of the 1950s testify to the strength of the Cold War legacies. In other words, official and popular responses to 9/11 in the U.S. closely followed the protocols and beliefs formed and practiced in the earlier era of crisis. For instance, May points out that it was “during the cold war” that “the apparatus of wartime” became “a permanent feature of American life” 162 Jae Eun Yoo not only as rhetorical, but as a societal structuring principle” (9/11 220). If, as Jodi Kim argues, the Cold War has produceda hermeneutics peculiar to its social and international conditions, the same paradigm continues to shape the U.S. and its international relations today. The return of the Cold War’s political and cultural paradigm in the days following 9/11 manifests the often unnoticed fact that the legacies of the Cold War continues to exert their power at present; the recognition of such lasting influences of the Cold War era appears to have triggered a renewed interest in re-interpreting the historical period that has been popularly considered as terminated in triumph. At the start of the 21st century, a new generation of scholars began to read the Cold War and the 1950s in a more global context, moving away from the formerly dominant theme of containment. Heonik Kwon, Josephine Nock-Hee Park and Jodi Kim have explored how the bipolar Manichaean rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was triangulated in Asia, highlighting the impulses of decolonization in different Asian countries. According to Park, the Cold War “was not only East and West, communism and capitalism, but also struggles between North and South, the colonizer and the colonized” (10). In his recent book Cold War Crucible, Masuda Hajimu also maintains that regional differences are more important in understanding the Cold War than the previously popular paradigm of a homogeneous, universal conflict. According to him, the Cold War is an “imagined reality” that responded to and reflected particular disorders in different regions, differing in features and processes before becoming “the irrefutable actuality of the postwar era” (2). Significantly, Masuda focuses on the Korean War as the best example for displaying the intricate process No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 163 through which different political needs in each participating nations eventually coagulated to become a conflict on whose meaning the involved parties agreed on, regardless of the different angles from which they initially approached the war. The historical importance of the Korean War is imperative to understanding the Cold War and the world that it has formed. Bruce Cumings claims that this so-called forgotten war “remade the United States and the Cold War” (205). In fact, the Korean War had a major impact on American domestic politics and international affairs, stimulating the generation of protocols to be followed by the nation in later crises. Cumings argues that “the Korean conflict was the occasion for transforming the United States into a very different country than it had ever been before: one with hundreds of permanent military bases abroad, a large standing army and a permanent national security state at home” (207). Dudziak also points out: Korea’s importance for examining war and social change is [such] that it helps us to focus on the dynamic that would drive domestic reaction to war through the rest of the century. Alongside a permanent arms industry was now an ongoing effort to manage public opinion . this would prove to be important in the early years of the twenty-first century, when buildings fell in Manhattan, and an American president declared war on terrorism. (War-Time 93-94) In other words, the amnesia about the Korean War could have been a condition under which the official responses to 9/11, including the preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the former now dubbed as a new “forgotten war,” were formed. 164 Jae Eun Yoo Despite its significance in understanding the Cold War era and current American international policies, the Korean War remains to be forgotten in the U.S. David Halberstam complains that the war is still “largely outside American political and cultural consciousness” (2). According to Cumings, however, rather than “the forgotten,” the epithet “the unknown” would better suit the Korean War; the war, unpopular even in the beginning of the Cold War era, was hardly ever reported or recognized in the U.S. (63). From the very start of the war, the Truman administration was intent on disguising the nature of the war, preferring to call it as police action. In addition to this deliberate misrepresentation, the news of the war, not to mentions pictures from it, hardly reached the American public. The harrowing brutality of the battlegrounds, a condition imposed predominantly by the American air force, was largely unknown in the U.S. due to media control. Regardless of the grudges of the veterans who returned from the Korean War, this collective amnesia continues today. In this sense, it is significant that the Korean War, whose nature, if remembered and explored, can shed a new light on the public memory of the Cold War, is emerging in some literary works. The prevailing responses to 9/11, both official and popular, revived the memories of the Cold War. In the process, several writers seem to have noticed the potential of the Korean War as a less-explored and relevant subject. The conflict’s forgotten status itself seems to have made it very poignant theme with wide-ranging pertinence to contemporary events. The particular significance of the Korean War as a subject matter in the wake of 9/11 is further emphasized when one compares the new Korean War novels with the ones published in the 1950s and early No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 165 1960s. Even the more artistically achieved, critically acclaimed works like William Styron’s The Long March (1952) and James Salter’s The Hunters (1956) focus on the conflicts of the prolonged war situation— prolonged, because the soldiers that star in the works likewise served in WWII. Published in 1968, H. Richard Hornberger’s MASH, as well as the movie and the popular TV series that was loosely based on it, is a response to the Vietnam War. In contrast, the two recent novels on the Korea War, Lark and Termite (2008) and The Coldest Night (2012), zoom in on two particularly disturbing incidents of the Korean War: the No Gun Ri massacre and the battle of the Changjin reservoir. The former was a ruthless massacre of Korean civilians by U.S. soldiers, and the latter was an overwhelming defeat of the U.S. marines, which changed the nature of the war from a glorious emancipatory conquest to sluggish yet costly skirmishes along the original, pre-war border. The two are among the more acknowledged incidents of the war, though in a limited way. The battle of the Changjin Reservoir is one of the more recited lore of the U.S. Marines, while the No Gun Ri massacre was unearthed in the 1990s by AP, causing widespread consternation and official responses from the Pentagon and the White House. However, the Battle of the Chanjin Reservoir is hardly known outside the boundary of the marines, and the No Gun Ri massacre was likewise quickly forgotten. Had they been widely known, these two episodes would revise the official interpretation of the Korean War, as they would seriously damage the reputation of American military’s might and its role as a peace keeper in the early days of the Cold War. Written by the two authors with growing stature in contemporary American Literature, Jayne Anne Phillips and Robert Olmstead, the 166 Jae Eun Yoo two novels, Lark and Termite and the Coldest Night, do not hesitate to bring to light these ugly forgotten episodes and explore the ways in which they resonate with the lives of those within the U.S. However, the two novels replicate some of the clichés in describing the Korean War to some degree. Furthermore, after excavating and examining the relevance of the Korean War, they simulate the older paradigm of returning to domesticity, reflecting not only the cultural and political tendency of the 1950s but also that of the public responses to 9/11. This paper intends to read the significance of the two novels’ treatment of the Korean War, as well as the limits therein, in order to understand the implications of the shifts in the American public memory of the Korean War. I. Lark and Termite: No Gun Ri Massacre In September 1999, the Associated Press broke a shocking story from a long forgotten war: “American veterans of the Korean War say that in late July 1950, in the conflict’s first desperate weeks, U.S. troops killed a large number of South Korean refugees, many of them women and children, trapped beneath a bridge at a hamlet called No Gun Ri” (Choe).

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