The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War

In the fall of 1999, a team of Associated Press investigative reporters broke the news that U.S. troops had massacred a large group of South Korean civilians early in the Korean War. On the eve of that pivotal war's 50th anniversary, their reports brought to light a story that had been surpressed for decades, confirming allegations the U.S. military had sought to dismiss. It made headlines around the world.

In The Bridge at No Gun Ri, the team tells the larger, human story behind the incident through the eyes of the people who survived it. The American side, the green recruits of the "good time" U.S. army in Japan, was made up of teenagers who viewed unarmed farmers as enemies, and of generals who had never led men into battle. On the Korean side were peasant families forced to flee their ancestral village caught between the invading North Koreans and the U.S. Army. The narrative examines victims both Korean and American; the ordinary lives and high-level decisions that led to the fatal encounter; the terror of the three-day slaughter; and the memories and ghosts that forever haunted the survivors.

Based on extensive archival research and more than 500 interviews with U.S. veterans and Korean survivors, The Bridge at No Gun Ri is an extraordinary account of the tragic events of July 1950 that the world should never forget.

Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe and Martha Mendoza were awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for breaking the No Gun Ri story. Hanley is a special correspondent with the Associated Press International Desk in New York who has covered a half dozen wars over thirty years. He is a U.S. Army veteran of Vietnam. Choe is an Associated Press reporter in Seoul, South Korea. Also a military veteran, Choe received a special award for his No Gun Ri work from the Korean Journalists Association. Mendoza, the recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, is an Associated Press national reporter in San Jose, California, who has won numerous awards for her investigative work. Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft, who was the fourth member of the Pulitzer team and contributed to this book, is an expert in public records and electronic research.