Pentagon Probe of No Gun Ri Incident

Money spent on investigating No Gun Ri is yet another affront to our military people and a waste of our tax dollars (“Deal Weighed in Korean War Slaying Probe,” Oct. 23). Modern war is a horrible business, and the lives of innocents are part of the bloody cost. It may well be true that many blameless Korean civilians and some North Korean soldiers in civilian disguise were killed at No Gun Ri by the bullets of our beleaguered soldiers. Civilian fatalities are not new in war.

In World War II, our airmen often bombed cities and towns in Nazi-occupied territory in Europe. Innocent civilians--babies, children, women and old men--were also killed. Is there a real difference when lives of innocent civilians are taken by bullets or by bombs?

No Gun Ri is long past. It is a sad, ghastly and regrettable paragraph in the very thick and grisly volume of the “Book of War” in this century. Now, however, the Pentagon seeks to reopen an old wound. It is “just beginning to organize a broad investigation that may last a year or more.” What next? Who is gaining from this costly business? Our military people did the best they could with what they had and under the conditions they were in. Let us remember them with honor, express regret that innocents died and close the book on No Gun Ri.

AARON STEENBERGEN

Bakersfield

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So some veterans groups want blanket immunity given to those who massacred civilians in the Korean War because “it would be unfair to punish aging veterans for an incident that occurred half a century ago”? Yet I somehow doubt these same groups will be protesting the arrest and jailing in France of 89-year-old Maurice Papon (Oct. 23), an aging veteran, for war crimes against Jews that he committed in World War II, more than half a century ago. Murder is murder. Regardless of whose side the perpetrators were on.

BOB MORRIS

Venice