hankyoreh

Surviving family members of civilian victims slaughtered by South Korean troops hold up placards demanding an apology and reparations from the South Korean government. (provided by the Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation)

My grandmother Huỳnh Thị Chi (then about 65 years old); my mother Nguyễn Thị Tào (about 40); my younger brother Ngô Một (5); my sixth paternal aunt Ngô Thị Liên (about 30); my aunt’s husband Dương Văn Bốn; my cousins Dương Thị Việt, Dương Thị Nôm, and Dương Thị Phú; and the baby in my aunt’s belly.

I never dreamed I’d have a chance to tell Koreans these names someday. It was Korean soldiers who slaughtered these nine family members in a single day. They came from a distant country all the way to the village of Khánh Lâm, Tinh Thien Commune, Son Tinh District, Quảng Ngai Province, Vietnam, and slaughtered my family. I’ve thought about that incident every day now for more than fifty years. Over and over again, I’ve asked why the Korean troops murdered my family, but even now, I don’t know. I really need to get an answer before I die.

Not long ago, my hopes were kindled. On Mar. 10, my village got a visitor from South Korea – a woman who introduced herself as Ku Su-jeong, executive director of the Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation. During twenty years in Vietnam, she’d been writing stories about villages where Korean troops had carried out massacres, and meeting the victims, but she said this was her first time to our village. She told us that she’d had to ask around and follow many leads before coming upon the memorial we’d put up for the victims.

It makes me really angry to think that the Koreans who made our lives a living hell for more than 50 years didn’t even know about our existence. There must be many villages like ours whose tragic story has never been told in Korea. I think it’s time that Koreans learned what happened. It’s time they learned the story of my family. My name is Nguyễn Thị Lam, and I’m 71 years old.

I remember the day the Korean soldiers came to our village. It was Sept. 26, 1966, and I was 18 years old. I was married, but my husband was in the army. Hearing the news that the Korean army was coming, all the men in the village fled, leaving the old people, women and children behind. The other villagers and I took shelter somewhere else. On the first day, the Korean soldiers didn’t kill anyone.

The thing we’d been fearing took place two days later. The Korean soldiers found my family members and the other villagers in the air raid shelter where they’d been hiding. After forcing them to leave the shelter, they fired guns and threw grenades at them. They burned down our houses and our belongings.

The silver lining, I suppose, is that my brother Ngô Văn Kiệt (10) and my baby brother – who still hadn’t been named, because he was only 1 month and 8 days old – miraculously managed to survive, hidden among the adults. When the villagers came to collect the bodies, they found my baby brother suckling at my mother’s breast. I heard there were a lot of newborn babies like my brother who survived the scene of that awful massacre. Even in death, a woman tries to shield her baby with her body.

After returning to the village two days later, I watched the husband of my father’s cousin, burying the bodies of my family members. It was a horrible moment. But the horror was just beginning. While I was staying at my husband’s house, I took care of my younger siblings. My father’s fourth sister brought my baby brother home, but since there was no one to nurse a newborn, she sold the baby to a captain in the South Vietnamese army. When my father eventually returned to the village, he was stupefied to learn that nine of his family members had died and that his youngest son, after barely surviving the massacre, had been sold off by his younger sister. He passed away within the year.

My orphaned siblings were scattered to the four winds(in all directions). My older brother Ngô Văn Mậu was sent to prison for his anti-American activism, and my younger sibling Kiệt lived a hardscrabble life, barely eking out a living by selling popsicles.

Ku Su-jeong said that when she returned to Korea, she would tell people there about my family members’ terrible deaths. She said she would ask the government to carry out an investigation, offer an official apology, and make amends for the victims. That’s why I signed the petition, and the same can be said for Kiệt. But my older brother Mậu decided not to join the petition. He didn’t see why we victims were obliged to grovel before the Korean government.

I think that Koreans need to remember who we are. They need to tell us exactly why my family members were massacred. Kiệt’s last wish is to tidy up the graves of our mother and other relatives.