RESPONSE FROM "JIMMIE JOE"
Fishhook Junction,
Source: Shirley Watkins’ KWVets Onelist.com
Guerilla activity was a fact of life in those days. They did slip through our lines with the refugees, and hundreds, if not a few thousand, young American boys lost their lives. Rumors would have run rampant about everything. North Koreans mixed in with refugees. Orders not true. Orders that were true. "The captain said kill them all." "He told you that?" "No, I heard it from someone." Orders that were lawful. Rumors that were unlawful. Lack of communications breaking any semblance of the chain of command. The whole North Korean army about to be on top of them. Spread out too thin for the senior non-coms and officers to have control over the series of events about to unfold.
Let’s set the stage at Nogun-ri….
Green troops land at Pohangdong
and two days later they are in the area of the enemy. In reality there was no front line. They were segments of lines. They would have
heard the stories and rumors of
Being strafed
by our own aircraft, who very well could have mistaken our troops mixed in with
the refugees as the enemy, adding to the confusion. Some of our own men took cover under the
railroad bridge to escape the strafing, and riflemen opened up on them along
with the refugees. Panic, confusion and
orders/rumors too vague were passed down the chain of command, i.e., "Don’t let
any refugees thru lines." How do you
stop thousands of refugees from coming thru?
There were over five million refugees in the Korean War, and many of
them occurred in the first few months.
One of my clearest memories is the long lines of refugees with their
back-breaking A-frames. Fire on them,
but use discretion where it involves women and children??? What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Enemy disguised
as refugees! How does one discern foe
from innocent??? What does one do? When does one do it? Where is the lieutenant? Can’t let them out from under the railroad
bridge—by now they are sure there are enemy in with them. Machine gun positions would have been on each
side of the railroad tracks so there would be a field of fire on each
side. That is normal, not a positioning
to execute the refugees.
A Korean survivor claims the
machine-guns opened fire after dark.
Darkness falls and the ghosts of death began to stir in
the green troops. Far off sounds seem
close, and the dark reveals shifting shapes which are not there. One rifleman or machine gunner panics and
fires at some damned imagined movement or sound. The whole area erupts in gunfire directed at
the culvert where they believe the enemy is.
As the tracers ricochet through the culvert, the ones on the other side
believe they are under attack from the culvert, and return the fire which
ricochet through into our troops on the other side. Now each side of the culverts know the enemy
is in the culverts. So goes the
battle. So goes mixed up confusion. So goes the lives of innocents and so goes an
unintended massacre by green, under-trained, confused and frightened American
boys. Had this been an ordered massacre
the refugees would have been all killed in a short period of time. It doesn’t take three nights to kill a few
hundred trapped inside a culvert.
According to one Korean survivor, we helped bury some dead the next
morning and gave medical care to the survivors.
DOES THAT SOUND LIKE AN INTENTIONAL MASSACRE?
American boys
will/would carry the pain of this time with them unto the grave. Only death will relieve the guilt and
pain. This is quite sad. The investigative reporters did not go far
enough. They went just far enough to
meet their agenda (of attempting) to disgrace the values of the Korean War and
the honor of some green troops of long ago or visions of a Pulitzer prize. Nay, worse yet, they would bring disgrace on
all who fought in
Where pray God are competent journalists to follow through and get
the facts of those times, those specific conditions? The hoards of refugees, in many cases mixed
with the enemy, troops barely trained for conventional combat let along
guerilla warfare which
We were not
cold-blooded killers of civilians, otherwise there would have been literally
tens of thousands killed by the ground troops as the million or so passed
through our lines. Nor would we have
taken hundreds of thousands of POWs.
I for one am in
need of a response to this besmirchment of my/our
honor. You see, a response can never be
made by myself, by my buddies, or by the Army. Most will not believe us. Most will refuse to believe our upbringing
and honor preclude cold-blooded killing of the innocent.
There will be a
few who have fought this war for fifty years who will now decide it is time to
go to that land beyond the sky. The
battles they fought for fifty years a few journalists will finally kill
them. ---- God Bless America.
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