“ During Chun’s regime we thought we were heroes,” he said recently. But after reading that article, he began to feel burdened by a deepening sense of complicity, both as a cog in a larger machine of killing and later as a silent witness. The other went missing.Ĭhoi, now 64, said he hadn’t killed anyone in Gwangju. When apprehended, one of the students had tried to run and was shot, his body tossed into a creek. Choi immediately recognized them as students from a nearby high school who had been trailing behind his unit as it marched through a dark mountain valley to Junam village, the site of the bus shooting, on the night of May 21. ![]() His awakening of conscience came in the early 1990s, when he happened to glance at a newspaper article about two boys who had gone missing during the uprising. After the truth became public knowledge, he had painstakingly avoided watching or reading anything about Gwangju, hiding his past from even his wife and three children. During the dictatorship, when the events in Gwangju were glorified as a necessary measure against a seditious mob, Choi believed he had simply done his duty. After leaving the military in 1982, he had settled into the life of “just another ordinary young man,” dating, boozing and later starting his own construction firm. ![]() She had been taken by helicopter to an air base to be interrogated.Ĭhoi hadn’t bothered to watch the hearing. She recalled that the only other survivors were two young men, and that they had been led away and executed. Wearing a black blazer and a rigid frown, Hong testified that she had been a passenger on a minibus that had tried to drive past a military checkpoint before taking fire, and that 15 of the 18 passengers had died on the spot. South Korea’s first national reckoning with the atrocities committed during the Gwangju uprising was a series of televised parliamentary hearings in 19, the dawn of democratic rule.Īmong the numerous witnesses was a young woman named Hong Geum-suk. “They were crawling underneath the seats trying to live.”įor 10 days straight, the commandos went on a campaign of terror, clubbing and shooting civilians with a bloodlust that one journalist on the scene described as “human hunting.” At least 165 people were killed. “That’s when I could tell that they’d been executed,” Choi recalled. There were 15, most tangled in twos and threes underneath the seats. He tiptoed through the aisle, trying to not step on the bodies. Choi, a private first class, was the lowest-ranking member there, and the lieutenant in charge ordered him to board the bus and count the dead. ![]() The windows of the bus had been blown out, and its sides, riddled with bullet holes, gave it the appearance of a honeycomb. It was a clear spring day, and from the forested knoll where he stood, he watched the vehicle inch along a road running through a vast, golden field of barley before fellow commandos from the 11th Special Forces Brigade opened fire from both sides, bringing the bus to a halt. NET Framework Version:7.8964 ASP.NET Version:7.Choi Byung-moon remembers that it was around 10 or 11 in the morning when the white minibus came under attack. Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1266 Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer) +25 Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter) +99 Control.RenderControlInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter) +27 Control.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer) +19 Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children) +256 ToDecimal(String Value) +6ĪSP.city_state_aspx.GetLocation() in D:\home\site\_w, Control parameterContainer) in D:\home\site\wwwroot\include\head1.aspx:12 ToDecimal(String Value, NumberFormatInfo NumberFormat) +254 Source File: D:\home\site\wwwroot\include\functions.aspx Line: 93 ![]() Line 94: lng = reader_ull("Longitude").ToString() Line 93: lat = reader_ull("Latitude").ToString() Line 92: zip = reader_ull("Zip").ToString() Line 91: city = reader_ull("City").ToString() Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.Įxception Details: System.InvalidCastException: Conversion from string "" to type 'Decimal' is not valid. Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Server Error in '/' Application.Ĭonversion from string "" to type 'Decimal' is not valid. Conversion from string "" to type 'Decimal' is not valid.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |