hankyoreh

Nguyễn Niệm

Year of birth: 1933

Date of the massacre: Dec. 6, 1966 (solar calendar)

Description of the massacre: Around 6 that morning, I heard that Korean troops were on their way, so I fled the village. I was 33 years old at the time. As soon as the Korean troops were gone, I went back to the village to find my family. But my wife Đoàn Thị Diệp (24 years old) and my two daughters Nguyễn Thị Oanh (4) and Nguyễn Thị Hùng (2) were already dead. Shrapnel from the grenades was lodged in the back of my eldest son Nguyễn Thanh Tuán (8). My baby boy Nguyễn Văn Dũng (3 months) didn’t live past five days after the massacre. Only a few of the children in the village survived. The Korean troops indiscriminately slaughtered the elderly and the women.

Even now, I can vividly recall trying to recover my family’s bodies. It had been raining since the afternoon, and the bodies were slathered with mud. We couldn’t tell the bodies apart at first, so we had to wash each of them before we could recognize family members. We had to bury them into the ground right away, without even putting them in a coffin. On the day I had buried my youngest son, I expressed the grief I felt in a poem called “Hatred”: “Let this hatred last forever, because the debt of blood will be repaid with blood!” I still have the journal in which I wrote that poem.

Over the course of three days (Dec. 3-6, 1966), 430 civilians were massacred by Korean soldiers in Bình Hòa Commune. The Bình Hòa massacre, as the incident is called, occurred in five sites. At one of those sites, the Korean soldiers threw the bodies in a well after the massacre. To make sure that the bodies burned, despite the well water, the soldiers tossed in straw and oil before setting the bodies on fire. For decades afterward, the villagers here had to rely on a neighboring village’s well for their water. It took 40 minutes to walk to the other village and return home. (See “All I did was not ignore the massacre,” in the Hankyoreh 21, Vol. 1,175, Aug. 21, 2017)

What I want from Korea: The Korean government needs to investigate the Bình Hòa massacre and make an apology. There should at least be some humanitarian compensation to relieve the pain of the victims and the bereaved families.