전쟁은, 후세 사람들이 얘기할때는 왜 그랬을까?라고 전쟁의 참혹함을 안타깝게 얘기도 하지만...
월남전에서 용맹을 떨쳤던, 맹호부대, 청용부대의 무용담은 전사에 길이 남을 전공과, 그전쟁을 통해서 우리 한국이 경제적을 성장할수있는 Foundation을 만들어 주었음을 부인 할사람은 없을 것이다.
작전을 나가면, 후환을 없애기 위해서, 작전지역에 있는 마을 사람들은 어쩔수 없이, 특히 아녀자들은 타켓이 되는 경우가 있었다고, 월남전에 참전했었던 친지들한테 들었던 기억이 있다.
변명이 아니라, 전쟁은 그렇게 참혹한것임을, 굳이 보도한 그내용과 진의는 속시원하게 파악할수는 없지만, 당시 상황에서는 그래도 목숨을 살려 줬음을 감사해 했을법도 하지만, 45년 이상이 지난 지금이시간에 당시를 회상하면, 따이한들의 무자비함으로만 보일수 있을수 있을것 같아 무척조심스럽다.
전쟁은 있어서는 안된다. 더욱 눈에는 보이지않는 Coronavirus Pandemic과의 싸움에서 전세계는 손발 다들고, 무릎꿇고, 총한방 쏘지 못하고 굴복당하다 시피 하는것을 보면서, 더욱 인간과 인간사이의 전쟁은 승자도 패자도 고통이라는 선물만 남게 된다는 교훈을 잊지 말았으면 하는 바램이다.
아래 주인공으로 소개된 월남 여인의 얘기를 읽으면서, 이조시대에 중공오랑케의 침략으로 왕과 신하들이 피란까지 갔었던 "병자호란"당시를 떠올리게 하는데, 월남전 당시, 죄없는 젊은 여인들이 평생 잊을수 없는 곤욕을 치렀던것 처럼, 한국의 당시 젊은 여인들과 처녀들이 너무도 많이 Rape 당했었다는 역사를 배웠던 기억이 Overlap된다. 좀 과장된 표현일수 있겠지만, 그때 능욕을 당해 태어난 많은 아이들은 중공오랑케들의 피가 몸속에 흐른다는 점을 이해하는 방향에서 아래언급된 월남여인의 삶을 이해하면 좀 마음이 편해질것 아니겠는가.
더 깊이 파헤치면, 월남과 한국간의 외교관계는 최고의 정점에 있고, 이와 병행하여 경제적 협력및 무역은 동남아시아에서 중국 다음으로 큰 비중을 차지한다는점을 생각한다면, 들취낸다고해서 양국 국민들에게 득이 될것은 하나도없다고 믿는다.
The
man had come in to buy soy sauce. Tran Thi Ngai was working as a
midwife and nurse, but that morning she was looking after her parents’
shop in southern Vietnam while they were out.
He had
grenades hanging from his armour, guns on his belt. It was the summer of
1967, and the Vietnam War - pitting South Vietnamese forces, the US and
its allies, against the North Vietnamese Communists - was escalating.
As
he approached the counter, he held out the money. As Tran reached to
take it, he grabbed her arm, then her hair, and dragged her into the
back room of the shop. There he raped her.
“It felt as if my life was over,” Tran says. All she could do was channel her energies into working harder than ever.
When
she noticed her stomach swelling she assumed she was just putting on
weight. Then one day she felt a kick and realised she was pregnant.
Her
parents were horrified that she was expecting a baby out of wedlock - a
major taboo. The country’s social mores were heavily influenced by
Confucianism, and women were expected to remain virgins until they were
married.
“My parents called me ‘chửa hoang' (pregnant out of wedlock) - they beat me up badly.
“I didn’t want to carry on living. I felt completely dead inside.”
She tried to kill herself several times but survived - “it felt as if the foetus was fighting for me”.
Her
parents only stopped beating her once she gave birth - in February
1968. She was overwhelmed by how beautiful her baby girl was, but was
soon overtaken by anxiety.
“I was worried about my child growing up, worried about money, worried about how I could get back to work to earn a living.”
She
named the baby Oanh. But, hard as it is to comprehend, she wanted to
recognise the baby’s father in some way. The middle name would be Kim.
That was the soldier’s surname. Her rapist was neither Vietnamese nor
American. He was South Korean.
Four years earlier his nation had joined the US in fighting the Communist Vietcong in South Vietnam.
Not long after giving birth, Tran woke one night to find that Kim had appeared again, looking for her.
“He didn’t say a word, stood there for one or two minutes, then left,” she says.
A few days later, another South Korean soldier arrived. He
had been sent by Kim to take Tran and the baby to his base - that of the
28th regiment of the South Korean White Horse Division - in a remote
mountainous area south of her home town.
Ashamed and
isolated, she felt she had no other choice. She got into the car and
spent the next two years with her rapist. She was terrified the entire
time, fearing for her life and that of the child.
“It was coercion, rape, no love was there,” she says.
Tran had another baby girl with Kim, before being abandoned when he moved to another base.
She found her way back to her parents in Phu Hiep, trying to
work as many hours as possible to feed her children, until Kim once
again sent a comrade to her. But this time the soldier - whose name she
recalls was Park - was there, at least ostensibly, to help with the
children.
“He carried them in his arms, fed them, cared for them while I was out working.”
And then one day, Park, too, assaulted her. Tran conceived another baby - a boy this time.
Her family’s social standing was now irrevocably damaged.
“It
got to a point when living in the village became too difficult.
Villagers shunned me, accused me of having a Korean husband, [luring the
Koreans] here to kill the Vietnamese,” she says.
She and her parents fled to another part of the province, but her reputation followed her.
“If I introduced myself as ‘Ngai’, people would say ‘Oh yes, Ms Ngai. Beautiful, but she doesn’t have a husband.’”
They would ask her why she hadn’t aborted her children. She says that as a midwife she couldn’t entertain the idea.
“My
job was to help other women give birth - I took care of their babies, I
carried them, I embraced them, washed them, cut their cords. How could I
even think of destroying my own baby?” says Tran, her voice breaking.
In the same month Tran was giving birth to her first child, 11-year-old Nguyen Thi Thanh’s life was also changing forever.
On
the morning of 25 February 1968 Nguyen heard screaming coming from the
far side of her village of Ha My - not far from the now-popular tourist
town of Hoi An - and saw smoke filling the sky. She ran down the lane to
see what was happening. South Korean soldiers were pointing their guns
at her.
She ran back to the house to tell her mother, Le Thi Tho, that the village was surrounded.
“As I finished my sentence they poured into our house.”
Later reports were to suggest the soldiers were members of the Blue Dragon Division, a notorious South Korean marine corps.
They
ordered her entire family, along with another woman and her children,
and a friend of her younger brother, into the underground shelter in
their front yard.
They threw grenades in after them, killing Nguyen’s aunt and her infant cousin instantly.
She says her mother tried to shield her and her brother. “‘We are doomed, my baby,’ my mother cried out.
“My whole body was burning and then felt numb... I could see other people’s blood all over me,” Nguyen says.
Nguyen’s
eight-year-old brother lost a leg and eventually died of his injuries
in hospital. Only Nguyen and one of her cousins, both badly injured,
survived, crawling to a neighbour’s for help.
She says that the soldiers then burned her house down.
“I could hear the popping and crackling sounds from burning bamboo. I smelt smoke, fire.”
More than 135 people in Ha My were killed that day, with just a dozen of the villagers surviving, she says.
Although
she says South Korean soldiers had regularly visited Ha My before,
looking for Vietcong, she has no idea why 25 February 1968 was
different.
“We don’t know why they were so aggressive that day. They even killed three and four-month-old babies.”
What is known is that this period marked a turning point in the Vietnam War.
In late January of that year the North Vietnamese and Vietcong launched the infamous
Tet Offensive
- a bloody military campaign against the South Vietnamese, the US and
their allies. The retaliations were vicious, the most notorious being
the
My Lai massacre - the gang rape and mass murder of Vietnamese civilians by US troops in March 1968.
Nguyen did not witness the immediate aftermath of the killings in Ha My -
she was taken to hospital in Da Nang. But her older brother told her he
watched as the soldiers returned the next day with tractors to flatten
the village, destroying the bodies.
While there has not been an apology for the atrocities
perpetrated by the US during the 20-year Vietnam war, there has been an
acknowledgement in the form of
reparations and a damning
war crimes tribunal.
But
South Korea’s government, which now has close economic ties with
Vietnam, appears unwilling to engage in a review of its role in the war.
Seoul sent approximately 320,000 troops in a move analysts say was
rooted in a fear of a “domino effect” spread of Communism.
South
Korea’s ministry of defence sent a letter to Nguyen and 102 other
survivors last September saying it has no record of any civilian
killings carried out by its military in Vietnam and there needs to be a
joint investigation by both governments in tandem to check the facts,
but that this is currently unachievable.
The South Korea Veterans’ Association also attempted to sue her for defamation and fraud, although the case was dropped.
It
is not possible to prove who was responsible for the massacre that
killed Nguyen’s family in Ha My. But one South Korean veteran, Ryu
Jin-sung, says his division was responsible for a similar massacre just
two weeks before the Ha My killings.
Ryu’s company was on
patrol when a bullet was fired at them from the direction of Phong Nhi
and Phong Nhat, two villages a few miles from Ha My. Attacks began as
retaliation - the company dividing into three units to attack the
villages from three different directions.
Ryu’s unit was the first to move out, after his comrade shot dead an
unarmed elderly man. That evening he heard his comrades boasting about
killing young children and women, and the next day he saw bodies of
civilians laid out on the side of the road.
