The bridge at No Gun Ri

About this book

This is the untold human story behind the massacre of South Korean refugees by American soldiers in the early days of the Korean War, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists whose reports first brought to light this dark underside of the war, an episode long hidden from history. The book tells the deeper, intimate story of individual Americans and South Koreans whose paths intersected at the No Gun Ri bridge, where up to 400 innocent civilians were killed, mostly women and children. It looks at their ordinary lives and at the high-level decisions that led to the fateful encounter; at the terror of the three-day slaughter; at the memories and ghosts that forever haunted those who were there, soldiers and shattered Korean survivors alike. Drawn in vivid detail from more than 500 interviews with U.S. veterans and Korean survivors, and from extensive archival research, the book shows unmistakably where responsibility lay for widespread civilian killings in 1950 Korea. Extraordinary in its scope, shocking in its revelations, "The Bridge at No Gun Ri'' has been likened to Hersey's "Hiroshima'' as a powerful, classic testament to the ravages of war. (From publisher's material.)