The Bridge at No Gun Ri
 The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War is written in chronological narrative style and is organized in three parts, “The Road to No Gun Ri,” “The Bridge at No Gun Ri,” and “The Road from No Gun Ri.” It opens with two chapters that alternately introduce the readers to the young Army enlistees of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, mostly from poor backgrounds, many of them school dropouts, on occupation duty in post-World War II Japan, where they have been insufficiently trained and are unprepared for the sudden outbreak of war in nearby Korea; and then to the South Korean villager families and the age-old rhythms of their rural lives, to be exploded in late June 1950 by a Korean civil war borne of the new U.S.-Soviet rivalry, the Cold War. The next two chapters describe the deployment of U.S. military units to face the onrushing North Korean invaders, the growing nervousness of U.S. commanders who issue orders to fire on South Korean refugee columns out of fear of enemy infiltrators, and the disarray of the weakly led 7th Cavalrymen as they reach the warfront; and then tell of the villagers’ plight as they first seek shelter from the war by gathering in a remote area of their valley, and then are forced by retreating U.S. troops to head south toward U.S. lines. The 26-page middle section is an account of three days of carnage that began with U.S. warplanes attacking the column of hundreds of refugees, after which survivors were forced into an underpass and methodically machine-gunned until few were left alive among piles of bodies. Survivors estimated 400 were killed, mostly women and children. Seventh Cavalry veterans recalled orders coming down to stop all refugees from crossing U.S. lines and to “eliminate” the No Gun Ri group. This and earlier chapters describe declassified military documents showing such orders spreading across the warfront. The final section of four chapters follows the stories of lives shattered when they intersected at No Gun Ri, both of Korean villagers fighting to survive in the chaos of war, and of young U.S. soldiers fighting in the seesaw battles of 1950-51. In the postwar decades, the psychic toll of what the Koreans suffered and what the Americans did and witnessed weighs heavily on both, leaving them deeply depressed, sometimes suicidal, often haunted by visions and ghosts. One, Chung Eun-yong, a former policeman whose two children were killed at No Gun Ri, makes it his life mission to find the truth of who was responsible for the massacre. The section ends when an Associated Press reporter telephones Chung, at the beginning of a lengthy journalistic investigation. The book has two epilogues. The first describes the AP investigative work that found the U.S. veterans who corroborated the Korean survivors’ story and the declassified documents that further supported it, and the bibliographic, archival and interview sources for the book. (The AP team’s editor, Bob Port, later wrote about the reporters’ yearlong struggle to publish their explosive report in the face of resistance by AP executives.) The second epilogue details the serious irregularities in the U.S. Army report on the No Gun Ri investigation prompted by the AP disclosures. (Co-author Hanley later published a more extensive analysis of what the Korean survivors described as a “whitewash.”)