The Bridge at No Gun Ri: RESPONSES
Walzer, Michael
BACK IN THE 1960s, I criticized the Vietnam War, in part, by contrasting it with the Korean War. This was a way of distinguishing myself, and the part of the antiwar movement to which I...
...You can't fight in defense of another country if you have to fight against the ordinary citizens of that same country...
...It probably doesn't make sense, at this distance, to bring them to trial, but their standing in the annals of the U.S...
...MICHAEL WALZER iS co-editor of Dissent and author of Just and Unjust Wars, among other works...
...Some of the causes are easy, even comforting, to list, and so they were immediately evoked by people eager to defend, if not quite to justify, the killings described in the above AP dispatch...
...For the killings there were not committed "in the heat of battle...
...The American soldiers involved in the massacre were raw recruits, rushed into combat from Japan, and they were in headlong retreat...
...soldiers could have withdrawn safely without shooting at these civilian refugees—and that the officers on the spot knew, or should have known, that they could...
...Frightened and inexperienced soldiers are more likely to kill both brutally and randomly...
...Clearly, American officers, coached perhaps by their Korean counterparts, believed these to be hostile civilians: "all civilians seen in this area are to be considered as enemy and action taken accordingly...
...It couldn't have been possible to undergo a training in military ethics and then obey commands of that kind...
...Army headquarters, and the officers giving the orders were surely not raw recruits...
...The trials had barely ended in 1950, but it is now clear that American officers had not ac44 • DISSENT / Spring 2000 quired that heightened awareness of noncombatant immunity that Nuremberg and Tokyo should have taught—nor had they incorporated this awareness into the training of new soldiers...
...There is a deep contradiction in such a war, which appears here too in the Korean case, at least "in this area...
...In any case, they were bound to try...
...They were veterans of World War II, which ended only five years before the killings at the bridge, and which was followed by a major effort, at Nuremberg and Tokyo, to teach future generations a lesson about the crimes of war...
...But in Korea we were also fighting against a large-scale conventional invasion...
...Let's assume (what may be doubtful) that the official investigation confirms the AP account, that the commission avoids a whitewash and produces what might be called a strong reckoning...
...IT IS IMPORTANT to notice that many soldiers on the ground did not perceive the hostility of the civilians huddled under the bridge at No Gun Ri, did not consider them a military threat, did not believe that they harbored enemy soldiers...
...THE BRIDGE AT NO GUN RI I am not sure what should happen now...
...Some of the perceptions of innocence reported in the AP dispatch may be retrospective, nourished by a kind of moral hindsight, but some of them sound plausible enough...
...That same perception, spread across the whole of the civilian population, was critical in making Vietnam an unjust war...
...It was also a way of arguing that Stalinist aggression sometimes required a military as well as a political response...
...But it is important to acknowledge the crimes and examine their causes...
...This was a way of distinguishing myself, and the part of the antiwar movement to which I belonged, from those leftists who insisted that no American war could possibly be just...
...There would then have to be some kind of compensation for the victims and perhaps some further inquiry into the behavior of the individual commanders...
...I still believe that the massive invasion of the South by the North Korean army should have been resisted—even if, as we have now learned, the forces that led the resistance committed criminal acts...
...These are circumstances that, in many wars, have made for both rage and panic, emotions more easily directed against the civilian population than the attacking army...
...Discretion is just what soldiers don't have when they confront civilians...
...They seem to have been the direct result of orders issued from U.S...
...massacres are not "discretionary...
...The probability seems overwhelming that U.S...
...Fire [at] everyone trying to cross lines...
...No Gun Ri is a case of refusing to remember the lesson...
...military discipline reduces civilian casualties...
...DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 45...
...And there should also be something more: some kind of public acknowledgment that putting enemy soldiers on trial for war crimes— as we did, and rightly did, after World War II— is no barrier to war crimes of one's own...
...It couldn't have been possible to study accounts of the Nuremberg trials and then issue the command that came from the First Cavalry Division: "No refugees to cross the front line...
...Army should certainly be called into question...
...But this can be, at best, only a partial explanation of what happened at No Gun Ri...
...The only barrier is an army, and a political leadership, committed at every level to ensuring that the wars it fights are not murderous...
...Use discretion in case of women and children...
Vol. 47 • April 2000 • No. 2
