Haunted by Tunnel Vision

The war is a distant drumbeat now, a parade that has long since crossed over far horizons into history.

Truly, that battle on the Korean Peninsula a half-century ago--that conflict, that police action--had been a forgotten war, a faded bugle call in the calamity of larger events.

How strange and tragic that we remember it today.

Veterans who ached for recognition got very little as they straggled home in the 1950s. There were no bands, no confetti and damned few speeches.

Even that odd and ghostly monument dedicated to them just four years ago on a Washington lawn seems to reflect the loneliness and isolation of those who fought in Korea.

But at least its dedication indicated an awareness that almost 2 million Americans had marched off to a foreign land all those years ago to take part in a battle few understood.

“It took them a long time to remember us,” an ex-Marine told me at the monument’s dedication, “but here we are at last.”

And, four years later, here we are again.

But this time recognition is encompassed in a headline that strikes to the very soul of who and what we are: “GIs Massacred Civilians in South Korea.”

It wasn’t the kind of recognition we wanted.

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When the Associated Press story first appeared last week that a unit of American soldiers had killed up to 300 civilians at the start of the Korean War, it hit me like a punch in the stomach.

The piece told how old men, women and children, all Koreans, were gathered in a tunnel at a place called No Gun Ri when U.S. infantrymen poured hundreds of rounds of rifle and machine gun fire into them.

They were ordered to do so, a dozen soldiers admitted last week, because they feared that the civilians might be infiltrators from the North.

The soldiers, who were all members of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, have come forward to ease their consciences and to erase memories which, I’m sure, have haunted their nights.

By confessing, they seek forgiveness in the twilight of their lives, old men attempting to atone as shadows fall.

But while admitting to a brutality beyond imagination, they also haul into public scrutiny what they consider to be mitigating circumstances that surrounded their actions. They were following orders. They were young. They were scared. They were ill-trained. They were confused.

Hell yes. We all were. I was barely 20 when the Marines shipped me off to Korea. I was young. I was afraid. I was confused.

The difference was I was led by officers who never would have ordered me to kill civilians. If they had, I wouldn’t have obeyed. I had a heart and a brain long before I donned a uniform.

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“The word is honor,” Bob Torres said to me as we talked about it the other night. “That’s what we had that they didn’t have. You don’t dishonor the Corps. You don’t dishonor yourself.”

Torres spent 20 years in the Marines. The tradition of honor is important to him. You fight a war to win and you fight a war to survive, but you don’t fight a war to brutalize. We were warriors, not murderers.

Jack Siegal was a Navy combat correspondent who was in the war at the beginning. He understands how something like this could have happened. “They were kids,” he says of those who did the first fighting. “They were told to join the Army and see the world. They were in Japan, fat and happy and soft. And suddenly, they were in a war.”

Kenneth Cook, a vice president of the Korean War Veterans Assn., suggests that we just forget the whole thing. It’s past. It’s over. Leave it to heaven.

Is it that easy? Not for me.

I see the anguished faces of war’s innocent victims float past my dreams too many nights to simply forget what was done to them in the name of youth and confusion.

Someone has to atone for the crime. If not prison, apologies. If not extradition, reparations. There’s got to be a conclusion.

We clamored for recognition a long time ago. We wanted America to know what we had done and how much it had damaged us. It has now become painfully clear to everyone, in a way we never expected, how severe the damage was.

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com