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SOMETHING BAD HAPPENED at No Gun Ri on July 26, 1950. Exactly what may never be known.
In a Pulitzer Prize-winning story published in 1999, three Associated Press writers said, "Early in the Korean war, villagers said, American soldiers machine-gunned hundreds of helpless civilians under a railroad bridge in the South Korean countryside. Now, a dozen ex-GIs have spoken, too, and support their story."
A recently published book by Army Maj. Robert L. Bateman, a Stafford County resident, disputes the accuracy of the AP findings. "No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident" was published by Stackpole Books.
The AP investigative team, comprising researcher Randy Herschaft and writers Sang-Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley and Martha Mendoza, came to the conclusion that American soldiers were ordered to shoot South Korean refugees, that members of the 7th Cavalry Regiment's second battalion did so at No Gun Ri on July 26, 1950, and that for 50 years the U.S. Army denied that such an event took place.
The AP writers based their conclusions on what they were told by Korean survivors who have petitioned the U.S. government for redress, the recollections of American soldiers attached to the battalion at the time, and Army archival documents of the period.
Bateman, a former company commander in the 7th Cavalry, who spent a three-year tour teaching history at West Point, disagrees on the scope of the incident and the culpa-bility of U.S. troops.
He also researched Army archival documents and talked to veterans who were at No Gun Ri. He did not talk to any of the Koreans because of the language barrier, he said.
Bateman concluded there were civilians killed at No Gun Ri, but nowhere near the 400 claimed by the South Koreans. He also denies that battalion soldiers were given specific orders to shoot South Korean refugees.
Bateman contends the Americans were fired upon by South Korean communist guerrillas concealed among the refugees, and that's what set off the shooting.
Bateman is not the only person who has taken issue with the AP story. Pieces published in U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times and on the Web have also questioned its accuracy.
Different people looked at documents from the period, talked to people who were there. Different conclusions were drawn. How can that be?
"All sources are flawed," said Porter Blakemore, a Mary Washington College professor who specializes in military history.
Historians strive to create as accurate an account as possible, Blakemore said, but he noted that's difficult to do.
"I try to teach my students to weigh the evidence, decide who's more believable, what's more believable," he said.
In this particular case, Blakemore said, he would be inclined to give the U.S. military the benefit of the doubt.
"These types of things happen in war," he said. "Human beings react in very odd ways in combat situations all armies are guilty."
Journalists also depend on sources that may be flawed, said Karen Brown Dunlap. She is dean of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, an institution that provides training and support for journalists.
"Journalists are concerned with finding the right people [to tell the story] and dealing with their recall," Dunlap said.
It's possible, she said, that some of those sources may not be reliable.
"Those are traps for the journalist that are sometimes impossible to avoid," she said.
In fact, the AP writers did not avoid the trap. Edward Daily, who told the AP, "On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming," turns out to have been a mechanic with another unit located miles away instead of a machine gunner with the 7th Cavalry battalion at the time of the attack. The truth of Daily's whereabouts came to light after the AP story was published.
It was Daily's involvement in the story that got Bateman looking into the incident. He knew Daily through the 7th Cavalry, and had looked up to the older man as a hero of the Korean War, based on the stories Daily told of his service there.
"I knew Ed Daily, knew several of the veterans quoted in the story," Bateman said. "When I read the story I assumed it was true. At first I was just trying to figure out why it had happened, how we could do it so badly."
It turns out Daily's stories of a battlefield commission and being taken prisoner in Korea were no more genuine than his memories of No Gun Ri.
"For all those years, Daily had duped me, as well as dozens of other[s]," Bateman wrote in his book. "He was not the decorated, battlefield-commissioned, heroic cavalryman we all thought he was."
It was when Bateman got hold of Daily's actual service record, in April 2000, that he decided to go back and look at the whole story more closely.
His research led to the book. In it, he accuses the AP writers of sloppy journalism at the very least, if not outright misrepresentation.
"I believe that thousands of South Koreans were killed by American soldiers, hundreds of them deliberately killed. Just not at No Gun Ri," Bateman said.
In fact, Bateman said, he is thinking about doing another book, a history of American massacres.
"I found a lot," he said, "at least six in Korea."
The AP's Hanley is passionate in defense of the work he and his colleagues did on No Gun Ri, accusing Bateman of deception and fabrication.
"He simply dreams things up about us that he thinks would put us in a bad light, then puts it in black and white, knowing many readers are gullible," Hanley wrote in a fax to The Free Lance-Star.
Hanley even wrote an intemperate letter to Bateman's publisher, asking him to drop the book.
"I hoped to find an honorable publisher who would do something about it," Hanley said in a telephone interview from New York. "The book is so full of lies. It's crap, it's a fairy tale."
There's a delicious irony in a journalist trying to stop publication of a work by a military man, considering the long history of the military's efforts to curb journalists' reports in wartime situations.
Hanley's letter didn't work. "We're quite proud of the book and the way it turned out," said retired Army Col. Edward Skender, Bateman's editor at Stackpole Books, in a telephone interview. "He's set the record straight."
Dunlap, of the Poynter Institute, was a member of the Pulitzer committee that awarded the AP story the prize for investigative journalism in 2000. She, too, defends the journalists' work.
"It was an outstanding story, well above the rest of the entries. The effort they put into seeking out people across the nation who had been involved It was well documented," she said.
Dunlap explained that it was impossible for the Pulitzer committee, meeting for a period of three days, to verify the accuracy of any submission. The judges depend on consistency of information within the story and on attached documentation provided by the entrant.
She said she wasn't surprised at Hanley's reaction to Bateman's repudiation of their story.
"Both journalists and historians get emotionally involved in their stories," she said.
So who's right?
"You'll never know exactly what happened," Blakemore said.