hankyoreh

On July 15-20

Three Kyung Hee University students and an exchange student from Vietnam have spent over a year and a half working on a “team project” they started in spring 2017 while taking a general education course. Even after the class’s conclusion, the group members – Kyung Hee students Gu Bon-joon (26), Oh Yu-jin (20), and Kim Min-ju (19) and Vietnamese exchange student Thu Binh (21) – have carried on with their effort, which involves raising awareness of the massacres of civilians by South Korean troops during the Vietnam War and offering comfort to the victims.

“The three of us South Korean students and Vietnamese exchange student Thu Binh thought about something meaningful we could do, and we decided to look into the Vietnam War,” explained Gu.

“We’re writing a book based on our experiences during the project and the stories we heard from the Vietnamese victims themselves,” he added.

Interested in the Vietnam War as a topic, the students were confronted in spring 2017 with the “inconvenient truth” of civilian massacres. During the conflict, South Korean troops reportedly killed 74 villagers in Phong Nhi and Phong Nhat and 135 in Ha My. The facts have never been fully brought to light. Kim Min-ju, who had been working to support Japanese military comfort women survivors since entering university, said she was “deeply shocked to learn that South Korean soldiers had massacred civilians.”

“When I was working to help comfort women survivors, we demanded an apology from Japan. But after I learned that we too were guilty and had done great harm to people, I decided we needed to express our apology to the Vietnamese people,” Kim added.

Between July 15 and 20, the students traveled to Vietnamese communities where the victims continue living today, including Phong Nhi, Phong Nhat, and Ha My. Truong Thi Thu, an 80-year-old survivor they met in Ha My, explained that she had lost two of her children in Jan. 1968, along with her own right foot. Thu Binh, who interpreted for the South Korean students during the visits, said she had “only then truly learned about things I wasn’t really aware of before.”

“It was really tough for me to fully convey the stories the Vietnamese survivors were telling me and the emotions as I understood them to the other team members,” she added.

The students even worried that their actions might be aggravating the victims’ suffering.

“One of the survivors said, ‘When I think about what happened, it’s just difficult for me, because I know that getting angry or hating won’t change anything. I just try to bury it away,’” Gu recalled.

Hearing these things only made the Kyung Hee students more committed to pushing forward.

“It felt like the survivors were saying those things because they aren’t certain they will ever hear an apology in their lifetime,” Oh said.

“It pained me to see the way they seemed to be bearing all that suffering and trying to put an end to it alone. Whenever I saw that, it made me think that we need to we need to get the South Korean government to make an official apology or something like that,” she added, her eyes sparkling.

The team has been thwarted a few times. They attempted to raise a memorial next to the “monument of hatred” for South Korean troops in the village of Binh Hoa. The plan was scrapped this spring due to opposition from the Vietnamese government. They also organized exhibitions on the victims of civilian massacres at Seoul’s Ttukseom Han River Park and Kyung Hee University, but the efforts drew little attention. Still, the students have no plan of giving up.

“I think young people our age need a better understanding of history so as not to repeat the same mistakes,” said Oh, who expressed a firm commitment to continuing the effort going ahead.

“With a climate of peace taking shape between South and North Korea, now is the perfect time to apologize to Vietnam,” she said.

By Choi Min-young, staff reporter

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