No Gun Ri: Journalism Versus History
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Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax
Monday, April 22, 2002The controversial Pulitzer Prize winning series by the Associated Press states: "It was a story no one wanted to hear. Early in the Korean War, villagers said, American soldiers machine-gunned hundreds of helpless civilians under a railroad bridge [No Gun Ri] in the South Korean countryside.”
Now there is another story – one the AP doesn’t want to hear. It’s a new book entitled, "No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident,” by former West Point history professor Robert L. Bateman.
In "Military History," Bateman takes relish in quoting the key AP source, Ed Daily, as he emotes from the pages of the award-winning series: "‘On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming,’ said Daily, of Clarksville, Tenn., who went on to earn a battlefield commission in Korea.”
The ironic truth, of course, is that Daily was never at No Gun Ri and had never been commissioned – painful points first driven home by U.S. News & World Report and the now defunct Stripes.com military news site a few years ago.
Stolen Valor
Any doubt about Daily’s stolen valor was canceled when he admitted his perfidy to prosecutors, who nailed the officer-impostor for fabricating papers that led to the award of medals he never earned, as well as the fraudulent receipt of hundreds of thousands of dollars of VA compensation for phantom combat-related post-traumatic shock.
If Bateman stopped with the character assassination of Daily, the incident at No Gun Ri might have left its final, albeit confused and contradictory, footnote in the history books. Instead, Bateman disinters the half-century old drama, not so much to ferret out the truth of No Gun Ri or to save the military’s honor, but to lambaste a team of journalists he claims bent or disregarded facts in a rush to nail a sensational scoop.
"The Associated Press knew about the problems with all three of these veterans’ accounts, at least as far back as the summer of 1998, yet chose to ignore both the expert advice of the archivists and the documentary evidence that it culled from the archives. The AP published its story with Edward Daily, Eugene Hesselman, and Delos Flint at the core…”
We know about Daily. With help from "Stolen Valor" author B. G. Burkett [To order Stolen Valor, click here.], who pointed Bateman in the direction of old military "morning reports,” Bateman discovered that reputed AP massacre witness Hesselman had been shot in the foot and evacuated from the scene before the evening of July 26, 1950 when troops of the storied 7th Calvary had reportedly opened fire on helpless civilians.
Similar situation with Flint who, says Bateman, "could not possibly been at No Gun Ri on July 26, 1950 as he had been shot and evacuated the day or night before.”
Bateman presses on to dissect everything about the AP modus operandi, focusing often on what he interprets as language carefully crafted to omit the exculpatory.
"Supporting the Korean claimants, the AP story states are ‘a dozen ex-Gis.’ This part of the story contains a truth (several soldiers and a former officer had told the AP that civilians were killed at No Gun Ri…).”
But, according to Bateman, the AP reporters later admitted that they "had gone through more than thirty-four interviews before they found a single person who supported their thesis [Daily]. After that, from more interviews, some 130 in all according to the story, they culled a few who supported the thesis put forward by the Korean claimants.”
Key Omissions
Bateman’s issue with all this is that the crucial omission – that apparently the majority of those contacted denied that the event happened – is never addressed in the story.
"Of 130 interviewees, the AP claims that six of these witnessed or participated in the event; that leaves 124 veterans…who did not or were not quote worthy. Six witnesses trump 124 because obviously those 124 must be hiding something….”
Following through on the numbers game, Bateman looks at a claim by one of the AP authors that more than twenty-four general officers were interviewed.
"This is a remarkable feat,” Bateman snears, "since of the officers from the 7th Cavalry during that period who were still alive in 1997, no more than a handful of those former lieutenants and captains ever made the rank of brigadier general, and none of those men were quoted in the AP story.”
Historian Bateman sees the devil in the details, details he claims AP never fully unwrapped. The AP originally claimed that the No Gun Ri story was "more than a year in the making.” But Bateman notes that No Gun Ri AP reporter Charles Hanley publicly stated that the story actually took only a few months of reporting and writing.
Bateman maintains that the AP reporters exhausted much time wrangling with the editors, not ferreting out the bedeviling details – details such as a carelessly misplaced quote from a Korean Veteran, Herman Patterson:
"‘It was just wholesale slaughter,’ Patterson said.”
As Bateman notes, Patterson was referring not to events at No GunRi, but to a battle that occurred several days later when the 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry was overrun by the North Korean People Army.
AP Counterattack
The AP reaction to the Bateman indictments began well before "Military History’s" publication by Stackpole Books this month. Late last year, Hanley fired off a letter to the Pennsylvania publisher beseeching the editors to pass on the Bateman tome as just so many "diatribes and defamations.”
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Hanley justified his unusual letter by saying, "It is more than appropriate for me to defend my professional reputation and the reputations of my colleagues against a man who…has attacked our integrity based on nothing more than his own wild imaginings and ignorance.”
Hanley said Bateman’s version of what happened at No Gun Ri is "simply a vicious attack on us (the AP writers) personally, with fantasies about our psyches and motivations, about our mysterious evil journalistic methodologies, and about the dark secrets he imagines we’re keeping.”
But what does Bateman say about the event itself?
It is nothing like the tale of carnage implied in the AP story. Bateman concludes that between 18 and 70 civilians died from a combination of air and ground attacks in the area of No Gun Ri at the end of July 1950.
What Happened at No Gun Ri
"I believe the most accurate total of casualties at the No Gun Ri site itself is around twenty-five dead, with at least that many wounded. Among those deaths were at least two armed South Korean communist guerillas that made the very bad mistake of opening fire on American soldiers from within a crowd of civilians.
"The incident at No Gun Ri was, therefore, not the massacre of war crime proportions one might think it was after reading the Pulitzer Prize-winning news article.”
One of Hanley’s critics is Joseph L. Galloway, co-author of "We Were Soldiers Once and Young,” the best-seller book that recently emerged as a major motion picture starring Mel Gibson. Galloway also wrote the U.S. News & World Report story that first opened salvos against the AP reporting of No Gun Ri.
In another twist, the introduction to Bateman’s book was penned by retired Army Lt. Gen. Harold Moore, co-author of "We Were Soldiers” and the real life battalion commander, who battled with his troops in the first major engagement of the Vietnam War.
As to impostor-outer Burkett’s feelings about the whole drama: "Bateman…presents facts rather than gossip, second-hand information, or journalistic fabrication… [Batemans’ book] is "a powerful counterpiece to those who would distort the truth.”
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