LETTER TO THE EDITOR FROM

MICHAEL SMITH

News-Gazette, Champaign, IL

October 18, 1999

 

 

I’ve been fortunate to know American servicemen who served with honor in Korea as well as Koreans who remember the refugee camps.  I would like to thank the News-Gazette for its front-page coverage of the 1950 massacre of Korean refugees at Nogun-ri.  Not all media felt it to be an important story. 

    Nothing will resurrect the hundreds of slain civilians, ease the pain of survivors or wash away 50 years of regret felt by some of the GIs.  However, widely publicizing the story does in some small way honor those lost that day. 

    Forty-five million South Koreans owe their freedom in no small measure to the United States, and hope that they can count on us again if the day ever came. 

    I disagree with John Frothingham (Oct. 10 letter) of Tolono.  Unlike him, I believe that most of your readers were interested, and recognized that those were real mothers trying in vain to hide real children from American soldiers, that those were real grandfathers unable to protect their families, that those soldiers were otherwise fine young men engulfed in their own terror committing acts that they would normally find impossible to imagine. 

    Although Frothingham says he would have given an order to fire that day, I never met a veteran who I think would have.

 

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