【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). The New York Times and the Washington Post soon followed with stories of veterans and survivors, though the latter’s narratives appeared to be fragmented, with important parts omitted (Choi 368). Responding to the public clamor that the news created, the Clinton administration commanded that the Pentagon conduct an investigation. The Pentagon’s official inquiry into No Gun Ri was released in January 2001; while it acknowledged the fact that such an No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 167 incident did occur, it concluded that the killings were an unfortunate part of the tragedies that are inherent in any war, refusing to admit any responsibility for it. The White House closed the case on the same note, even using it as a call for better preparation for future wars. About a year later, the BBC pointed out that the pentagon’s conclusion omitted some military documents that prove that in the earlier phase of the war, the U.S. military considered Korean refugees as enemies to be shot. Jeremy Williams, producer of the BBC documentary “Kill 'em All: The American Military in Korea,” emphasized that “[a]long with the My Lai atrocity 20 years later in Vietnam, the killings discovered at No Gun Ri mark one of the largest single massacres of civilians by American forces in the 20th century.” However, the story of No Gun Ri soon disappeared from public view again (Choi 370). Published in 2009, Lark and Termite was nominated for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel alternately presents the story of Corporal Robert Leavitt who was killed in No Gun Ri, and that of Lark and Termite, two children in the dilapidated small town of Winfield, West Virginia, in 1959. In July 1950, a few weeks after the initial North Korean invasion that started the Korean War, Leavitt leads his untrained, bewildered soldiers retreating toward the fast-shrinking southern hold of South Korea. During the early days of the war, the soldiers in confusion moved along with Korean refugees, but feared that North Korean infiltrators may be among them. Leavitt leaves his place in the march to help a Korean girl who is carrying her blind little brother support her elderly aunt. Suddenly American airplanes show up and start to attack the refugees, so Leavitt rushes the Koreans toward a tunnel under a bridge 168 Jae Eun Yoo to hide from the strafing. Before they reach the tunnel, however, Leavitt gets hit by friendly fire and loses consciousness. The Korean girl drags him inside the tunnel to protect him, but he never recovers enough strength to stop his soldiers outside from massacring the hiding refugees. A few minutes before Leavitt dies, he sees machine guns aimed at the crouching Koreans. He eventually dies along with all the other Korean refugees who took shelter in the tunnel in No Gun Ri. Ten years later, during the same days of the year, Lark and Termite, children who are raised by their aunt Noni, face and survive a catastrophic storm. The novel slowly and deliberately builds up the connection between the two sites and periods, across what Leavitt thinks of as “a terrible gulf of time and dimension” (21). Corporate Leavitt’s story is clearly that of No Gun Ri, but to make the setting even clearer, Phillips has inserted the pictures of the No Gun Ri bridge and the tunnel underneath it between the chapters. Thus, the novel is an attempt to understand here and there, the unknown war in an unfamiliar country and everyday life in the U.S. before and after the war. Alternately visiting Korea in the summer of the 1950s and West Virginia in 1959, the novel gradually reveals connections between the lives of people through parallel scenes and characters. What Boyd Creasman identifies as the elements of magic realism in “Souls in Drifting Suspension: The Theme of Transcendence in Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite,” are mostly related to the connection made between the Korean War and the U.S., as well as between the parent’s generation and the next (70-72). For instance, the mysterious Social Service agent Robert Stamble who brings a portable children’s wheel No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 169 chair for Termite, which later turns out to be critical for Lark and Termite’s escape from the town, shares the name of Robert, Termite’s father. Stamble vanishes without a trace after Lark and Termite are rescued from their flooded house. According to Lark, he “was real in his way, but not from now, or here” (252). A dirty orange cat always follows and watches Termite; the last chapter of the novel reveals that the children’s mother, Lola, Leavitt’s war widow who commits suicide, was called “the cat.” Most of all, the similarities between the two sets of children stand out. The precocious Korean girl whom Leavitt helps carries a younger blind boy on her back; the boy hears the sounds of the attacking American planes before anyone else does. The Korean sister and brother resemble their American counterparts, with the clever and responsible Lark taking care of her disabled brother Termite, who is also sensitive to sounds. As the story progresses, the readers learn that Termite, the American boy who was born with severe birth defects and is suffering from physical and intellectual disability, is the son of Robert Leavitt. Termite appears to be an embodiment of the legacy of the Korean War. He was born the moment his father, still trying to save the Korean civilians who were trapped under the tunnel, dies along with the other Koreans in No Gun Ri. When the novel is narrated from Termite’s point of view, the readers learn that the boy sees and hears his father’s last hours. For instance, when Termite listens to a train passing over a bridge in his town, he hears the sounds in the Korean tunnel in which his father died 10 years ago: “There’s a picture inside the roar, a tunnel inside the tunnel. He’s been here before and he looks deeper each time and he sees. There are sleepers everywhere, bodies 170 Jae Eun Yoo crowded together. The bodies are always here, so many of them in the tunnel when the train roars across above, bodies spilled and still, barely stirring” (123). Later, he even witnesses the massacre: “The light comes on white and Termite sees inside it when the pounding starts, pounding and pounding while the bodies are slashed and spilled. The bodies fall still and stay and a blue air slips up form between them, form this one and that one, air that is thin and veiled curls, smooth silvery ribbons turning to find a way out” (276-77). When Termite sees blue colors unattached to any material in the present, the color resonates with the shapes in the eyes of the Korean boy whom Leavitt saw dying: “He [the blind Korean boy] seems to stare at Leavitt with eyes that never move or waver, and the startling pale blue splash in his black irises is the last image Leavitt sees as his vision quietly fades, a light turned down to nothing” (184). Termite’s peculiar features of disability not only reflect those of the blind Korean boy who was killed by the American soldiers, but also are the expression of the injunction of his father who senses Termite’s birth as he passes way. Leavitt’s last thoughts are:
It’s now, he can feel it. His baby is born, deep inside him where the pain throbs. Look inside, he tells his son, inside is where you really are. Don’t look, only listen. His son is born. Leavitt feels him turn in the salt and the blood, squalling and screaming in the close hot wet. Stop screaming, Leavitt tells him. Never scream. They’ll find you Stay still. Listen. You can’t come with me now. Breathe, breathe. Take your turn. (244)
Leavitt knew that his troops were preparing to kill everyone in the tunnel, so his last advice to his son can be applied to the Korean boy No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 171 he tries to save. As Termite hears and sees the last moments in the No Gun Ri tunnel, he is, in a sense, a survivor and witness of the incident; his symptoms of disability are an expression of the atrocity. As his mother thinks, “he[Termite]’s what happened to Bobby (Robert Leavitt). He’s where Bobby went, where Bobby is” (282). Through Leavitt’s experience, the novel also underlines the suffering of the American soldiers sent overseas, and through his family, the life of those who were left in America. Upon learning that her mother has committed suicide, Lark asks: “What happened to her?” The answer is: “Sadness” (258). “The war happened. That boy she married was killed in Korea. People forget that a soldier’s death goes on for years—for a generation, really. They leave people behind” (258). In an interview, Phillips said that through her novels, she is “basically trying to redeem that past, trying to make it live again and save something of it. Save something. Keep something from fading away” (187). She revives the same through Lark and Termite. In “Silencing Survivor’s’ Narratives: Why Are We Again Forgetting the No Gun Ri Story?” Suhi Choi argues that the media coverage of No Gun Ri in the U.S. followed two narrative patterns: “Ill-Equipped Troop’s Unfortunate Mistake” and “Fear Stricken Soldiers’ Defensive Action.” Lark and Termite combines and follows these patterns in describing Leavitt’s story. For instance, Leavitt repeatedly contemplates how his confused and scared soldiers had no time to be properly trained: “This failing police action is UN in name only. The Americans, caught completely off guard when the North invaded in June, are scrambling, their asses hung out to dry. Ironically, the three months in Seoul with LIS before the invasion have made Leavitt one 172 Jae Eun Yoo of the 24th’s more acclimated platoon leaders” (21). Trying to find a way to prevent his soldiers from killing Korean civilians in the tunnel, Leavitt thinks “Scared kids with weaponry do evil things” (79). The implication is that if the other soldiers were better prepared like Leavitt was, having learned some Korean Language through the Language Immersion Seoul Program before the war started, the massacre would not have happened. The problem is that rather than raising anti-war sentiments, these narrative patterns made it possible to use No Gun Ri as one more excuse to call for better preparedness for future wars (Choi 375). Accordingly, having surfaced briefly at the end of the Cold War era, the No Gun Ri accounts served the continuing agenda of American Imperialism, and was soon forgotten again afterward. The fact that Lark and Termite brings up the incident itself is a meaningful attempt to revitalize the past and acknowledge its long-lasting, yet unacknowledged influence on the present. At the same time, however, the novel’s following of the media narrative patterns inadvertently reinforces the message the media coverage conveyed earlier. Furthermore, in a review for Home, another noteworthy novel on the Korean War, Sarah Churchwell complained about “the tendency in recent American novels about the Korean wars” such as Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite “to displace all the cruelty on to secondary characters, keeping protagonists pure and noble.” In other words, because Levitt dies while helping Koreans, and the other soldiers who massacred the Korean refugees remain collective, vague, and are excused for having been untrained and scared, the image of American soldiers and American military operations overseas remain untainted. As a result, the tragedy of No Gun Ri is presented as almost a natural No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 173 catastrophe, akin to storms and floods that visit Winfield—natural disasters that are beyond human control, or as Termite’s mysterious disability, one that no one can redress or take responsibility for. In other words, as represented by Robert Stable the ghost-like social agent and the cat that may be Lola, or the sounds that Termite sees but no one else hears, the connection between the two places and times are not really understood, though strongly hinted at; they remain mysterious beyond human understanding and explanation. In the same way, the connection between the Korean War and the American present is only implied, instead of being understood or processed. The only distinct shared feature between them may be the overall harshness of life in general, which ultimately highlights the importance of close family ties. Lola sent Termite to Noni for the sake of Lark, so that they have each other to depend on. The special emotional bond they form sustains them through crises. Towards the end of the novel, after their aunt, Noni, gets convicted for a death during the flood, Lark decides to run away with Termite in order to stay together. As her boyfriend Solly joins them in their flight to Florida, they form a pseudo-family. In other words, the support that Lark, Termite, and Solly provide each other gives them strength to survive the storm, the flooding that ensued, and the family secrets of the earlier generation. Focusing on this conclusion of the novel, Creasman argues that the work ultimately “captures the challenges and unbreakable bonds of family politics” (61). The last scene from No Gun Ri strengthens this theme as Termite sees Leavitt “clear against the light and his father turns and walks. His father has a boy like him a girl like Lark, and he takes them with him, out of the tunnel” (277). That is, in Termite’s 174 Jae Eun Yoo vision, the soul of the father saves and leads those of his children.
II. The Coldest Night: The Battle of Changjin Reservoir
After the Inchon Landing and restoration of Seoul in September 1950, the Truman administration commanded a march north beyond the pre-war border, practically invading the North Korean territory (Cummings 22). For this march, McArthur’s army was divided into two columns, one moving through the west coast and the other, the 1st Marine Division, after an amphibious landing on the east coast, advancing through the eastern mountains. Though perceived as a victorious course of war at the time, in hindsight, this move was in fact a strategic error because the U.S. military had failed to detect the North Korean scheme to lure them deep into the northern mountains inevitably divided and thinly stretched out so that it would be easier to defeat them in a guerrilla-style war (Cumings 19). In late November, a vast number of the Chinese army attacked, surprising and defeating the U.S. army; even the better-prepared and equipped Marines in the east had to withdraw to south with a drastic loss of lives. The horrible suffering and desperate fighting the marines experienced while retreating back to Hungnam, the designated transport port, survived as one of the more famous anecdotes among the U.S. Marines. As one of the more storied exploits in Marine Corps lore, the battle of Changjin Reservoir (called Chosin Reservoir by the Marines, following its Japanese name from the colonial period) is one of the remembered episodes of the otherwise forgotten war. The stories unanimously highlight the bravery and perseverance of the marines under the No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 175 harshest circumstances. However, the emphasis does not hide the fact that the battle was a defeat in a major scale. After the battle, the U.S. military never went so far into the North as it did, and the Korean War turned into a stalemate, which fundamentally persists even today. The Coldest Night is a story of a poor young boy, Henry Childs, who falls in love with a girl from a rich and powerful family. The novel is the last installment of Olmstead’s previous two novels, Coal Black Horse and Far Bright Star, whose protagonists are also Childs, possibly ancestors of The Coldest Night’s protagonist. The Korean War is featured in the middle of the novel, and the plot closely follows the progress of the Battle of the Changjin Reservoir. Henry arrives in Korea via an amphibious landing operation and his troops move north toward Hamhung through cold, uninhabited mountainous regions in a long, thinly stretched-out march. Olmstead describes the operation in critical light: “The line of march was already too long and too thin to be supplied and supported by reinforcements, and they all knew this, even the fools among them. Each man knew they were the lethal plaything of the old men who directed them, the old men who were always fighting the last war” (108). The novel is also faithful in its presentation of the tactics used by the Chinese: moving and attacking during nights and hiding during days; eerie bugle calls; the overwhelming force of the sheer number of men. Despite having better air power, Henry’s platoon is ordered to retreat to an evacuation seaport after waves of attacks from the Chinese army. The horrible violence and cold that Henry and his comrade Lew suffer during the battle and the retreat are vividly described. In the first section, Henry is a high school junior, raised only by his 176 Jae Eun Yoo mother who came down from remote mountains to a poor neighborhood in a small town in West Virginia. His falling in love with Mercy, the daughter of a local judge, causes him serious troubles, as her father and brother physically threatens him to break up with her. Henry runs away with Mercy to New Orleans and briefly leads an emotionally precarious life in the big city. However, they are soon discovered; Mercy is taken away and Henry gets severely injured on the head by Mercy’s brother, Randolph. At the start of the next part, the readers learn that Henry, still only 17 and having joined the Marines by lying about his age, is about to land in war-torn Korea. In the middle section, Henry’s platoon chases the retreating North Koreans north above the 38 parallel, and is then defeated and scattered by the Chinese army. Horrific scenes of violence are depicted as Henry and Lew run south to escape. Historically, the U.S. Marines retreated to Hungnam port to evacuate, but Henry and Lew, sole survivors of their troop, arrive late and miss the transport ships. Lew dies from his wounds, and Henry turns south alone: “It was a 150 miles down the peninsula to the thirty eight parallel” (194). In the third and last section of the novel, Henry somehow is back in the U.S. How Henry returns to the U.S. is never revealed, but the third part shows the drastic changes the war made in him. Henry suffers from traumas of the war, but at the same time, he has toughened as a man. In a bloody fight, he totally overpowers Randolph. Sandwiched by Henry’s experiences in the U.S., the Korean War is presented in connection with Henry’s eventual maturation. In this sense, it can be read as an attempt to incorporate the experience of the war into the main character’s life, not as a separate, distantly isolated No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 177 incident, but as an event that has lasting impact, even on the lives of the people in the U.S. Moving through the barren Korean landscape, Henry notes: “It was a land of wood, hay and stubble, a land as if he’d dreamt it, and he could not yet tell that these were the witnessings a man never forgets. He would remember it all in random unbidden moments and they would spring on him, and these would be among his occupying memoires for the rest of his natural life” (97-98). In other words, the novel registers the effect of the Korean War on the otherwise isolated domestic scene. The novel also makes gestures towards connecting foreign violence to that of the history of war and violence of the U.S. through Henry’s maternal ancestors. Henry’s grandfather and uncles, presumably protagonists in Olmstead’s previous two novels, were engaged in the Civil war and a military operation in Mexico respectively, and accordingly left the legacy of a violent life to their descendant. Henry’s mother acknowledges the legacy in her letter thus: “The old soldiers, they killed countless men. Your grandfathers and your uncles were not innocent. In taking you away I had hoped to save you from that. Little did I know it was not for me to decide. Little did I know the futility in our departing the home place” (154). When Henry returns to the U.S., his disillusioned eyes see the prevalence of meaningless violence and death in hishome country. The engineer of the steamboat that carried Henry homeward became alcoholic after his wife and his children drowned. Upon returning home, Henry learns that his now deceased mother was raped by his father when she conceived him, and that his father was shot dead by his grandfather in retaliation. Henry witnesses a car explode on a bridge and the driver of the car drown in the river. When he visits 178 Jae Eun Yoo
Lew’s family, Lew’s father has both legs amputated from an accident at his workplace. Henry’s experiences seem to indicate how war-like the everyday struggle to survive in the U.S. is for the underprivileged. The violent features of the lives of Henry’s hometown people coincide with what Toni Morrison noticed about the 1950s: “the general idea of it as very comfortable, happy, nostalgic. Mad Men. Oh please. There was a horrible war you didn’t call a war where 58,000 people died. There was McCarthy.” The episodes of violence and traumatic aspect of lives reverberate with Henry as he has learned to be violent in the war. At first, while in Korea, Henry notices that he and his fellow soldiers were affected by “the violence that seemed to be always within them, convulsive and necessary” (100). During the battle of Changjin Reservoir, Henry “felt not fear but terror inside himself and determined he would rise up and kill again, not because they were trying to kill him but because the terror they mad inside him was killing him” (151). When Henry meet Randolph, Mercy’s brother who once almost killed him, “the violence that seemed to be always inside him was pleased by this encounter” (264). Henry confronts Randolph and unleashes his violent energy on him: “It was the war had taught him to call up the devil and he could feel the devil in his legs and arms” (267). Beating Ralph half to death with bare hands, Henry “knew he could have killed Mercy’s brother with his hands and it was this knowledge that gave him peace” (269). The fight shows that the Korean War has transformed Henry into a bloody warrior/murderer, and that the transformation is permanent: “He knew the hold war had on him, the gore that would never come off in this world” (269). No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 179
In this way, Henry’s traumatized mind and scarred body points to the lasting influences of the U.S. military interventions, and its resonance for the time the novel was written and published is important. Chris Bohjalian, in his review of the novel for the Washington Post, notes that “[g]iven the huge numbers of numbed and broken veterans returning from our own, present-day wars, Henry Childs is a character who resonates all too much with contemporary times.” In a similar manner, historians have pointed out the poignant similarities between the Truman and the Bush administrations in their respective responses to the Korean War and 9/11. Young draws parallels between the Korean War and the war against terrorism thus:
Harry Truman responded to the North Korean invasion, which he cast as aggression across an international border, by securing support from U.S. military moves from a compliant UN, putting American troops in the field, and calling for a world-wide mobilization against Communism. The state goal was to drive the North Koreans out of the South in what was at first an unmanned military effort (late, a police action) but never a declared war. Having driven the North Koreans back, Truman went on to make war against North Korea as Bush, who set out to capture bin Laden dead or alive, went on to make war on the Taliban (14).
On the other hand, The Coldest Night repeats some of the better-known clichés in describing the Korean War. For example, the coldness that the Marines suffered during the Battle of Changjin Reservoir left an indelible impression on those who do remember the war, though in hindsight, the experience was limited only to the earlier phase of the war. The motif of extreme coldness appear on the statues 180 Jae Eun Yoo of the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., which were designed in a way that their “ponchos seem to blow in the cold winds of Korea.” David Halberstam’s recent book on the history of the Korean War is also entitled The Coldest Winter. The other worn-out motif relates to the terror the Chinese army wrought. The descriptions of their almost supernatural number and superhuman combat tactics, though coordinating with the Marine lore, do not reflect the historically proven facts that Chinese soldiers also suffered from severe cold and inferior fire power during the battle. Moreover, in the third section of the novel, the horror of the war is mitigated by the main character’s masculine maturation, which appears to be the ultimate condition under which Henry can serve as a father, the head of a traditional family. After his fight with Randolph, Henry finds Mercy and learns that he is a father. As Henry rejoins Mercy and his infant daughter, a chance for Henry to be healed seems to loom large. In other words, the novel concludes by reinstating traditional family values. Henry’s toughness seems to guarantee his ability to be a protector of a family, repeating the familiar “family values” toward which American popular culture turned in the 1950s and again in the aftermath of 9/11. In her study of the 1950s and the Cold War, Elaine Tyler May argues that in the 1950s, there was a popular agreement that the best way to defend America from the imagined external threats wasthrough the family. She writes: “Family stability appeared to be the best bulwark against the dangers of the cold war” (Homeward 9). The problem was that in pursuing “the self-contained home” (Homeward 1), Americans turned their back on the international conflicts in which No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 181 their nation was still playing vital roles, not to mention racial and material inequalities inside the U.S. border. The contradiction inherent in the containment policy of the cold war, in other words, was reiterated in the popular focus on the family, which, in turn, blinded Americans from international and political ramifications of the Cold War. A similar call for traditional family values was heard in the aftermath of 9/11, arguably because it was remembered as having been successful, regardless of the fact that the same indifference to the reality of international conflicts helped to shape the world in which America was hated to such an extreme degree. Again, the exultation of unity and domesticity helped the American public turn a blind eye to the consequences of their government’s military operations overseas. May deplores this recent revival of the homeward turn thus: “Trumpeting consumerism, fawning over law enforcement officials, demanding displays of patriotism, retreating into the private world of family and sex, and creating the illusion of safety through visible but largely useless performances of security did not bring about the end of the Cold War and will not likely hasten the end to this crisis either (Homeward 228).” It is significant that Lark and Termite and The Coldest Night choose to remember particular incidents of the Korean War in a way that registers some inherent connection between the American life and the hardly remembered war, especially when considered against the background of the post-9/11 discourses that set America and 9/11 aside and outside the historical and international context. The understanding of the connection between the Korean War and the U.S. in the novels, however, remains mysterious and beyond human understanding, much 182 Jae Eun Yoo like natural and emotional catastrophes the protagonists face. Both novels’ ultimate turn to the family, though somewhat different from the traditional form, almost amounts to disappointment as they appear to repeat, despite their initial attempts to unravel collective amnesia and indifference in evoking the Korean War, the historical turn to family that occurred again at the beginning of the twenty first century. No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 183
Works Cited
Bohjalian, Chris. “The Coldest Night, by Robert Olmstead, Takes Readers Back to the Korean War.” The Washington Post. 21 May 2012. Choe, Sang-Hun, Charles J. Hanley, and Martha Mendoza. “War’s Hidden Chapter: Ex-GIs Tell AP of Korean Killing.” Associated Press. 29 Sept. 1999. Web. 10 Oct. 2019.
______. Homeward Bound. New York: Basic Books, 2008. Morrison, Toni. “I Want to Feel What I Feel. Even If It’s Not Happiness: An Interview with Toni Morrison.” The Guardian. 13 Apr. 2012. Olmstead, Robert. Coal Black Horse. New York: Algonquin Books, 2000. ______. Far Bright Star. New York: Algonquin Books, 2009. ______. The Coldest Night. New York: Algonquin Books, 2012. Park, Josephine Nock-Hee. Cold War Friendships. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Phillips, Jayne Anne. Lark and Termite. New York: Vintage, 2010. ______. “Interview: Jayne Anne Phillips.” Appalachian Journal 21 (2): 182-89. Salter, James. The Hunters. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956. Styron, William. The Long March. New York: Random House, 1952. Williams, Jeremy. “Kill’em All: The American Military in Korea.” BBC. 2001. Web. 9 Oct. 2019.
유재은 한양대학교 부교수
논문투고일자: 2019. 12. 15 심사완료일자: 2019. 12. 16 게재확정일자: 2019. 12. 23 No Gun Ri Massacre and The Battle of Changjin Reservoir 185
Abstract
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)
Two recent novels on the Korea War, Lark and Termite and The Coldest Night, focus on two particularly disturbing incidents of the Korean War: the No Gun Ri massacre and the battle of the Changjin Reservoir. The novels explore the ways in which these ugly episodes of the war revise the official memory of the Cold War and resonate with the lives of those within the U.S. 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 the 9/11. This paper intends to read the significance of the treatment of the two novels on the Korean War as well as the limits therein to understand the implications of the shifts in the American public memory of the War.
Key Words No Gun Ri, The Battle of Changjin Reservoir, The Korean War, Lark and Termite, The Coldest Night