SEOUL — The South Korean naval unit had a reputation for not breathing through hostile territory, not even a pig sucking its nest.
After the unit was swept through Phong Nhi and Phong Nhut villages in central Vietnam on February 12, 1968, dozens of bodies were found, all unarmed civilians, most of them children and women, shot or stabbed with bayonets.
“This old man came out of hiding, his hands up,” recalls Ryu Jin-seong, a former Marine attached to the unit who was 22 at the time. “He kept begging for life, apparently thinking he would be killed if he was taken away.”
In a fit of rage, a sergeant swore and cleared his clip on the man, Mr. Ryu said.
The tragedy of the Vietnam War – which reverberated loudly this week during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan – continues to haunt the victims who witnessed and survived the two decades of bloodshed.
Nearly half a century after the end of the war, victims of the Phong Nhi and Phong Nhut massacres are asking for compensation from the Seoul government in the first lawsuit of its kind to be brought before a South Korean court.
Stimulated by shocking testimony, South Korean lawmakers and civilian groups are also pushing for a special law to investigate long-held allegations that South Korean troops killed thousands of civilians when they were the largest foreign contingent to fight alongside American soldiers during the war.
“I never got rid of the nightmare of the day South Korean troops came to our village,” said Nguyen Thi Thanh, 61, who lost five relatives, including her mother, sister and brother, and was wounded herself in Phong Nhi in 1968. “But the South Korean government never visited our village and never asked us what happened.”
South Korea sent 320,000 troops, calling them “anti-communist crusaders.” In return for its contribution, it won American aid that helped build the national economy. But it has long been rumored that South Korean troops have committed mass murders of Vietnamese civilians.
Discussions on the subject had been taboo under the military dictatorship in the past. But as South Korea gained more press freedom in the late 1990s, more media outlets began publishing stories about the alleged civilian killings. The one in Phong Nhi and Phong Nhut was the most documented.
The US military was investigating what happened days after the killings, according to released US documents.
According to the documents, U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese militiamen operating in Dien Ban, Quang Nam Province, heard shooting and saw huts burning after South Korean naval unit invaded Phong Nhi and Phong Nhut. The Americans and South Vietnamese helped villagers who fled with injuries. They later visited Phong Nhi to find piles of bodies, including a child and a pregnant woman who had been shot in the head at close range and “a young woman who was alive and had her chest cut off,” the documents said.
One of the US Marines took pictures.
More than 70 villagers were killed in the attack, according to US documents and recent survivor testimony.
“The victims of this incident were defenseless civilians, the vast majority of whom were women and children, who were murdered while begging for their lives,” Major John M. Campanelli, a U.S. naval investigator, wrote in the declassified documents Feb. 2. . December 18, 1968. He added that “in an effort to calm the survivors and relatives of the dead and wounded,” the executive officer of the South Korean Marine Battalion “apologised and gave 30 bags of rice to the district chief.”
In April 1968, U.S. military investigators concluded that “there was some possibility that a war crime was committed,” and shared the information with the most senior South Korean officer in Vietnam, Lieutenant General Chae Myung-shin. General Chae responded by claiming that the “massacre was an act planned and mercilessly chosen by the Communists.”
South Korean veterans told a different story.
mr. Ryu said there was a permanent order that if Marines received even a small fire, they should trace its origin and destroy anything they found, even unarmed civilians, in order to instill fear in the enemy. The task of demonstrating cruelty often fell to units nicknamed “killer companies,” including Mr. Ry, he said. The attack in Phong Nhi and Phong Nhut started after a small fire near the villages injured a South Korean marine, according to US documents.
mr. Ryu, a member of the second platoon, said that when his unit moved through the villages, they did not find any gunmen, but rounded up villagers. It was well known within the company that the third platoon, which led up the rear, slaughtered the assembled villagers, he said.
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“We heard that when the company commander was asked what to do with it, he gave a thumbs up and made the gesture of slitting the throat,” he said.
The US military reopened its business in late 1969 after the RAND Corporation, in one of its studies, exposed allegations of brutality by South Korean troops against Vietnamese civilians. It was around this time that South Korean intelligence began questioning members of the naval unit about the massacre, former officers told South Korean media outlets in 2000. At least one of the officers gave a report similar to Mr Ryu’s.
There is no evidence that Washington or Seoul have further investigated the matter. Instead, the U.S. military was accused by refugees and student investigators in the United States of suppressing evidence of civilian atrocities committed by South Korean forces.
After South Korea and Vietnam opened diplomatic relations in 1992, South Korean visitors met Vietnamese villagers who remembered the atrocities committed by South Korean troops. An investigation by a South Korean researcher, based on interviews with survivors and witnesses from the villages, reported that dozens of alleged massacres carried out by South Korean troops killed as many as 9,000 Vietnamese civilians.
In 2015, Ms. Nguyen and another woman became the first Vietnamese victims to visit South Korea to share their stories. In 2019, she and 102 people from 17 Vietnamese villages, with the help of South Korean citizen groups, petitioned South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in for an investigation and apology. Last year, Mrs. Nguyen files a lawsuit against the government of Seoul.
South Korea insists it has found no evidence of civilian deaths in its war records. When lawyers demanded that the intelligence agency release the results of its reported investigation into Marines in 1969, it refused, saying it could “neither confirm nor deny” whether an investigation had taken place.
In response to the petition in 2019, the Defense Ministry said it could not investigate the allegations because Vietnam was unwilling to cooperate.
When he visited Hanoi in 2018, President Moon expressed his “regret over an unhappy past” but stopped offering an official apology, which Hanoi has never asked for.
His words hardly calmed the victims in Vietnam.
“No South Korean government official has asked survivors to apologize,” said the petition to Ms. Nguyen’s Mr Moon and others. “We do want an apology.”
