Korea: February 10, 2001

Archives

Spokesmen for the Korean survivors of the No Gun Ri incident (in July 1950) were furious when Louis Caldera (at the time, Secretary of the Army) said that the survivors had developed "corporate accounts" of the incident in which their refugee column was allegedly strafed by US planes and machinegunned by US infantry. While the survivors insist that they have independent and identical memories, Caldera noted that the investigation had found large numbers of people with accounts of things that happened to (what each witness insisted were) relatively small numbers of people. Caldera said the reports suggest that survivors had passed around stories of what each individual saw until everyone believed they saw everything.--Stephen V Cole