hankyoreh

Date of birth: Registered as 1946; actual birth year 1950

Date of massacre: Aug. 25, 1969

Description of massacre: Around this time in 1969, I was away from my village looking after the neighbors’ cow. The shelling by South Korean troops started on a day when I went home to see my family. My mother and I fled in different directions. I hid in the air raid shelter at old Mrs. Hanh’s house. The South Korean soldiers found the shelter while they were going through the village. They began firing randomly inside the shelter. I wasn’t hit because I was hidden farther back than the others. But then the South Korean troops threw a grenade into the shelter, and I ended up suffering severe wounds to my right calf and head. The dozen or so people in there with me were all killed. I was the only one who survived. I was 19 years old at the time.

After I got out of the hospital, I couldn’t go back to my hometown. I made a difficult living working as a water-carrier in Đà Nẵng. I suffered serious symptoms from the grenade shrapnel embedded in my right calf. Even after having surgery to remove the fragments, my calf ached so much when the weather was cold that I was difficult to walk. There’s still a fragment from the grenade inside of my calf. I experience pain to this day. Afterwards, my vision began fading in my right eye. I went to the hospital for a checkup, and they told me it was the result of shrapnel in my head from the massacre, which was messing with the nerve connected to my eye. I’ve since lost all vision in my right eye.

What I want from Korea: The names of the 28 people killed in Mrs. Hanh’s air raid shelter are written in the mass memorial created in 2017 for the massacres at Duy Nghĩa, Duy Hải, Duy Thành, Bình Dương. At one point, I volunteered to serve in the Viet Cong out of anger toward the civilian massacres by South Korean troops. I now think the South Koreans were just mercenaries for the US military. I would like to see the South Korean government showing attention to the victims of civilian massacres and taking appropriate action to heal the wounds from the war.