Trauma and Survival in Nogun Ri

"The floor inside the tunnel was a mix of gravel and sand.  People clawed with their bare hands to make holes to hide in. Other people piled up the dead bodies like a barricade, and hid behind the bodies as a shield against the bullets… A baby boy's mother was killed during the strafing on the rail track.  The father managed to get the baby to the tunnel, but the boy was hungry and frightened.  He cried and cried.  And the American troops fired their guns into the tunnel whenever the boy cried.  The bullets fired in the direction of the crying.  People screamed that more would be shot if the baby kept crying.  The father didn't know what to do.  He might have thought the baby would die anyway, but he decided to silence it, in order to save the others.  He took the boy to the back of the tunnel and pushed him face-down into a pool of water.  I watched him doing that, and thought, 'What could be more tragic than this?'" (Kill 'em All 23:21-25:00)

In Kill 'em All, when the Nogun Ri survivor said that "the American troops fired their guns into the tunnel whenever the boy cried," I was really stunned over how cruel and senseless the actions of the American troops were, and what a grievous violation of the Geneva Convention the Nogun Ri massacre was.  Hearing the accounts of the survivors in this documentary contrasted with the accounts of the veterans was also very interesting, because it showed how much trauma the war produced for all parties, especially for Korean refugees.  This made me think about how people experienced and survived so many traumatic events in the Korean War.

The images of refugees fleeing the front reminded me of the images in Tae Guk Gi, of everyone leaving their houses in huge groups, carrying their possessions on their backs.  While Tae Guk Gi showed some of the hardships of evacuating, it didn't show how refugees were targeted in U.S. strafing, which made evacuating so dangerous.  When the Nogun Ri survivor asked, "'What could be more tragic than this?'" I thought about all the loss that particular family had endured because of the war.  The father of the baby lost his home, his wife, and his child.  If he survived, he would be haunted by all these traumatic losses– especially having to kill his own child to save others– for the rest of his life.  All these traumatic events make it so difficult for refugees, or anyone involved in the war, to survive, not only physically, but emotionally, and it also makes it hard for a country as a whole to recover.