This article, along with others about the history of the often misunderstood conflict, is featured in Newsweek's Special Edition: Vietnam War
On the morning of April 1, 1967, Nguyen Van Thoi was working in his rice fields in the rolling hill country of central Vietnam’s Phu Yen province
 Thoi was nervous: In recent weeks, South Korean army units had been sweeping through the area
 They were rounding up peasants at gunpoint and forcing them to move to “New Life Villages”—essentially barbed-wire enclaves near Vietnam’s eastern coast, in territory firmly controlled by Saigon
 But many people—including those in Thoi’s five-village commune of An Linh—were resisting the idea
 They didn’t want to abandon their agricultural livelihood and ancestral lands.Suddenly, Thoi heard the loud staccato of automatic-weapons fire and the dull thud of exploding hand grenades
 The noise was coming from the direction of his village of Vinh Xuan. Frightened, Thoi hid in the fields for the rest of the day, only daring to return home around dusk
 When he got to the village, what he saw was horrific: Homes were smoldering, and sprawled in great pools of blood on the ground were the lifeless bodies of at least 15 people—among them his wife and three of his four children (10 and 8 years old and a 4-day-old)
 The baby, who had been shot in the back, was still in his mother’s arms. Most of the victims had been shot in the stomach and back, says Thoi, now 71
 Many, he adds, had been disemboweled with bayonets. Thoi found his 4-year-old daughter, Diem, bleeding from five bullet wounds—but she had miraculously survived
 She later told him that a Korean patrol had burned the village, rounded up the inhabitants and murdered them
 Thoi dragged all of the bodies into a nearby bomb shelter and then covered the opening with dirt
 It became their tomb. Neither he nor anyone else ever reburied the victims. “I’m simply too sad,” he says
The massacre at Vinh Xuan was not an isolated event. In an exclusive investigation, Newsweek uncovered a pattern of atrocities survivors say were perpetrated by South Korean soldiers
 The Korean army was active in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. The killing seems to have been part of a campaign to depopulate three central Vietnamese provinces—Binh Dinh, Quang Ngai and Phu Yen—moving peasants beyond the reach and influence of Viet Cong guerrillas
 The survivors say Korean soldiers used threats of violence and military force to carry out the plan
 According to Vietnamese provincial officials, those who refused to leave—old men, women and children, mainly—were cruelly and systematically killed by elements of three Korean army divisions, named Strong Tiger, White Horse and Green Dragon
 Thanks to digging by a courageous Korean researcher named Koo Soo Jung, new eyewitness accounts like Thoi’s are beginning to emerge
 She has uncovered Vietnamese government documents that detail the Korean slaughter of thousands of peasants
 Witnesses say the mass killings were unprovoked, indiscriminate and usually occurred when there was no fighting with the Viet Cong
About the same time that Thoi’s family was being gunned down, Nguyen Hung Thoai, now 46, was running for his life in another one of An Linh’s villages
 Then 13, Thoai fled at the first sight of Korean troops walking up the dirt path toward his parents’ thatched farmhouse
 As he hid in a nearby field, he says he saw the soldiers set fire to the village houses and rough up his mother, her parents, his three younger brothers and sisters and the members of five neighboring families
 At bayonet point, the Koreans forced about 11 people, including Thoai’s family, to crawl into one of the earthen bomb shelters the peasants had constructed as a refuge from the periodic bombing of the area
 That left some 12 others standing outside the bunker. Without warning, the roar of gunfire and the explosions of hand grenades ripped the air, forcing Thoai to hide his head
When the smoke had cleared, the Koreans had gone. Thoai quickly surveyed the bloody scene
 He says a row of bloodied, bullet-riddled corpses lay in front of the bunker. There was no sign of any life either inside or outside the shelter
 Terrified, he ran away. He wasn’t able to return and rebury his family after the war
 “People didn’t want to leave their villages,” says Thoai, now a rice and sugarcane farmer in the area
 Breaking into tears, he adds: “We are attached to our houses, land, rice fields and gardens
 But anyone who hesitated to leave was killed. They decimated my village.”Such Korean cruelty drove many Vietnamese to embrace the Viet Cong
 Bui Thanh Tram was 16 when he saw Korean soldiers burn his house down and kill his 70-year-old father in An Linh in 1967
 He had escaped out the back of his family’s house just as several Korean soldiers burst in
 Tram says he saw them grab his bearded father and march him to the family bunker next to a stand of bamboo
 He says they pushed the old man inside and quickly chucked a hand grenade in after him
 Toward evening, Tram sneaked back into the village and dug up his family’s collapsed bunker
 “I only found pieces of flesh,” he says. After weeks of wandering and begging, Tram finally decided to flee to the mountains and join the communist guerrillas
 “I wanted to extract vengeance for the murder of my father,” says Tram. “How could I not do so after seeing what the Koreans did to my village?”See all of the best photos of the week in these slideshowsNguyen Ngoc Chau is 83 years old and feeble, but he feels the same hatred
 On May 22, 1967, he was a farmer in Hoa Dong commune, in Phu Yen province. Chau was visiting relatives in a neighboring village when he got the news: Korean soldiers had attacked his village of My Thuan the night before
 He rushed home. There, he saw villagers pulling 13 mutilated corpses out of the village water well
 Among the dead were eight members of his family—his pregnant wife, his four children (ranging in age from 4 to 16), his widowed sister-in-law and her two young children
 According to an old man who watched from a hiding spot during the attack, South Korean soldiers had thrown the women and children into the well
 He told other villagers that as they called out for help, the soldiers tossed in several hand grenades
 Chau buried his family in simple, unmarked graves—dirt mounds, really—which were placed in a line next to his current house in neighboring Phu My village
 “All the victims were just women and children,” he says. “How could they be communists? The Koreans are monsters
 If I saw one now I would chop off his head.”Korean soldiers weren’t the only ones that committed atrocities
 Just up the coast from An Linh, in the province of Quang Ngai, is the village of My Lai
 That’s where Lieutenant William Calley’s platoon slaughtered more than 500 unarmed villagers in 1968
 But in Phu Yen, the Americans are almost remembered fondly by the commune’s now middle-aged adults
 Pham Tu Sang, 47, a local official, recalls that during the Tet Lunar New Year celebrations in 1966, when he was 13, he played with GIs and received gifts of chewing gum and candy
 But in 1966, the American soldiers withdrew and handed Phu Yen over to the newly arrived Koreans
 “By Tet 1967,” says Sang, “the Koreans were killing us.” “Meeting a Korean was like meeting death,” adds Tram, who now heads a local war-veterans association
 “They shot anyone they saw.” An Linh villagers report that women feared Koreans even more than the men did
 The reason: They were often brutally raped before they were murdered.Hanoi is jittery about the new reports of Korean atrocities
 The country’s leaders are well aware that mass killings took place, but they don’t want reports about them published in Vietnam
 The government is fearful of upsetting not only Seoul—with which it has close relations—but also South Korean chaebol such as Daewoo, Hyundai and Samsung, which are among Vietnam’s largest foreign investors
 Hanoi is also afraid of losing the increasing numbers of South Korean veterans who have begun visiting the country as tourists
Local officials who lived through the Korean massacres don’t believe that the truth should be hidden to promote tourism and development
 They would like to see some kind of public accounting from South Korea, perhaps an apology or an admission of guilt that could only serve to bring the two countries closer together
 “The South Korean army created the worst suffering this province has ever experienced,” says one Phu Yen official
 “The victims were old people, women and children who didn’t have the ability to hold a gun
 We are not asking for material compensation but rather for understanding and a friendly gesture that can help the victims put the past aside
” Considering the amount of innocent Vietnamese blood spilled by the South Korean army, that seems a small request
From the Newsweek archive, 4/9/2000, by Newsweek staff. This article was excerpted from Newsweek's Special Edition: Vietnam War
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