The Korean War caught in history and memory: Examining United States media coverage of the No Gun Ri incident (1999--present) and Korean survivors' testimonies

This research dissects the memory texts of the No Gun Ri incident, in which U.S. troops killed South Korean civilians who were taking refuge on the railroad and trestles of the No Gun Ri Bridge in late July of 1950, an early stage of the Korean War. Specifically, this research compared two texts: (i) the media text---the U.S. media coverage of the No Gun Ri incident between September, 1999 when the Associated Press first reported the story of No Gun Ri and January, 2001 when the Pentagon closed its official investigation, and (ii) the oral text---the survivors' testimonies collected through oral history interviews conducted by the researcher in July and August of 2005.;The analysis of media texts identified three narratives: Ill-equipped Troops' Unfortunate Mistake, Fear Stricken Soldiers' Defensive Action, and Reconciliation, each of which contributed to locating the No Gun Ri text within a larger frame of the American collective memory of the Korean War. No Gun Ri also illustrated both the media's potency as channel and reservoir for counter memories, and their limitations due to the political context and to their own rhetorical conventions.;The narratives in media construction were analyzed in greater depth through comparison with narratives in the survivors' testimonies from the oral text. Survivors' testimonies not only illustrated oral memory's nature of elaboration and evolution through social interactions; but also revealed that certain memories of the incident (e.g., the tension in cross-cultural encounters between the U.S. GIs and Korean civilians, the North Korean soldiers' aid to refugees at the No Gun Ri incident) were largely obscured in the U.S. media coverage.;In conclusion, this research found the memory text regarding the No Gun Ri incident to be an "enduring testimony" that penetrated the collective amnesia surrounding the Korean War (i) by renewing a dialogue between the past and the present, (ii) by rupturing the homogenized perspectives of the War in American collective memory, and (iii) finally by highlighting a fissure between what we remember and how we have been socialized into remembering the Korean War.