American soldiers had to be trained to shoot at Koreans, and trained out of empathy for refugees. In article from Collier’s magazine in 1950, US Naval Captain Walter Karig describes a young pilot’s protest:
The young pilot drained his cup of coffee and said, “Hell’s fire, you can’t shoot people when they stand there waving at you.”
“Shoot ’em,” he was told firmly. “They’re troops.”
“But, hell, they’ve got on these white pajama things and they’re straggling down the road in little bunches of five and six pushing little handcarts full of bedding and stuff.”
“Heading which way?”
“South, mainly.”
“See any women or children?”
“Women? I wouldn’t know. The women wear pants, too, don’t they? But no kids, no, sir.”
“They’re troops. Shoot ’em.”
“But when you come over they stand there and wave . . . ”
“Shoot ’em.”
These official orders led to four days of horror in July 1950, near the village of No Gun Ri in Yongdong Province, where US jets strafed hundreds of villagers ordered to evacuate their villages. American soldiers opened fire for several days on those who took cover underneath a railroad trestle.
Ordered by US soldiers out of their villages, which was then torched, nearly 600 Koreans from No Gun Ri and Im Ke Ri were just preparing a midday meal on the road when US warplanes unleashed bombs and machine guns on the group. Chun Choon-ja, ten years old at the time, remembered: “It looked like heaven crashed on us. I threw away the water and ran to my mother. I found her moaning, breathing her last gasps. Part of her head was gone.” The planes roared away, but the Americans in the hills had now begun firing. Chun, her mother killed, ran blindly until her grandfather grabbed her hand and pulled her down into the stream and toward the tunnel of a railroad trestle, where she became separated from him again. “The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies,” she remembered.
To the US infantrymen of the 2nd Battalion, watching the air strike was “very hard to take”—the image was still lodged in their minds decades later. US veteran Buddy Wenzel recalled that “word came through the line, open fire on them . . . We understood that we were fighting for these people, but we had orders to fire on them and we did.” When the shooting cleared, soldiers rounded up the shocked and the wounded and herded them toward the trestle tunnels. Park Hee-sook, a 16-year-old who survived the No Gun Ri massacre, remembered entering the tunnel and seeing babies crawling over dead mothers. Inside the tunnel it was suffocatingly hot, and when people crawled out to get water or food, they were shot. Park was so thirsty she pushed aside bodies to drink blood mixed with water on the tunnel floor.