Veteran Says Bias Cost Him Top Honor

The wind ripples the yellow rice paddies. A green willow whispers. A gentle autumn sun warms the Korean countryside.

An unlikely place for a grave.

But it was on this rolling knoll on July 21, 1950, that then-Capt. Charlie Bussey of Los Angeles says he crouched behind two machine guns and single-handedly mowed down 258 North Korean soldiers disguised as peasants as they passed through the field below. It was here that Bussey says he ordered his men to dig a grave 75 yards long, the grave that he claims holds the bodies of those enemy soldiers.

“This was it. This is the tree. I’m sure of it. This old, old willow,” Bussey said. He sounds something less than certain, his usually strong voice softened by time and the tricks of memory.

If the massacre happened the way Charlie Bussey says it happened, it represents one of the greatest feats of individual valor in American military history.

And if he was denied the Medal of Honor simply because he is black, that represents one of the greatest injustices in Army history.

The Army never properly recognized Bussey’s deed, he complained, because America in 1950 could not permit itself to award its highest military honor to a black fighting man.

Bussey, now 68, said that his white commanding officer told him he would not recommend him for the Medal of Honor because “whites can’t allow black people to have heroes. That’s the most effective way of keeping them in their place.”

The injustice continues today, Bussey said, because racism still flows like a mighty stream through the United States Army and the nation it serves.

The Army historian’s office sponsored a trip to Korea last month for a reexamination of black troops’ performance in the Korean War. A secondary purpose was to try to substantiate Bussey’s claim.

Bussey did receive the Silver Star (two steps below the Medal of Honor) for killing “a number” of North Koreans on that sweltering July day 39 years ago, according to the citation with that award. Records of the time reflect no mass slaughter, and no eyewitness has come forth to verify Bussey’s claim.

He has a photograph showing a long trench containing dozens of bodies, and he says it is the mass grave of his Yechon victims. The picture provides few clues to when or where it was taken, and Army historians have been unable to substantiate Bussey’s claims about the photo.

Soldiers and officers in Army units in and around Yechon at the time never heard of Bussey’s exploit, although news of such a feat generally travels quickly among soldiers in combat.

Retired Maj. Gen. Oliver Dillard, who was in Yechon commanding a company of the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment on the day of Bussey’s supposed deed, said: “It’s hard to believe. All that action and nobody notified me?”

And extensive interviews last month with local officials and villagers who live near the site of the slaughter and the grave turned up not one witness who saw or heard anything that day or since to indicate that 258 North Koreans are buried in their midst.

“I’m convinced it happened--in (Bussey’s) mind,” said Thomas M. Ryan, the Army’s chief historian in Korea, “but not in three-dimensional space.”

Bussey said he is not looking for approval. He knows what he did.

“I’m no longer concerned,” Bussey said. “I’ve gone 39 years without that medal, and society still sees fit to withhold it. It’s the price a black man has to pay in this country. But I resent it. I resent it bitterly.”