Have you ever heard of the story of the No Gun Ri bridge massacre of the Korean War? I hadn’t either, until a couple of weeks ago.
In late July 1950, in the early days of the Korean War, U.S. troops killed a large number of South Korean refugees, many of them women and children, who were trapped under a bridge near the little village of No Gun Ri.
In the 1950s, the height of McCarthyism, it would have been unusual indeed to see stories about the U.S. military killing civilians, as it ran counter to the narrative of heroic patriots saving the world from bad guys.