When pink azaleas covered the mountain meadows, the children would eat the flowers.

Some were nearing retirement, like Nist, who would soon turn fifty.

Waegwan bridge.

Bursts of gunfire suddenly rattled through the tight, 200-foot-long passage.

That’s what American troops did, both veterans and Korean witnesses said. Air Force P-51s, propeller-driven fighters, flew routine missions up and down the river “interdicting” refugees, stitching the west bank with lines of .50-caliber machine-gun fire. Men of the Garryowens’ 2nd Battalion even began shooting refugees who did not try to cross, but

These were not the same GIs who had led them from their homes. One had a radio pack on his back and a second used the handset to talk to someone, villagers remembered. An Asian-looking soldier trailed them, Chung Koo-hun said, and the teenaged villager appealed to him. “I said in Japanese, ‘Please help us.’ He seemed to sympathize. He said, ‘I’m

One civilian trying to hide in the culvert

On the front line at No Gun Ri, men remembered fellow soldiers recoiling in their foxholes, revolted,

Back in the village, however, life for these midcentury Koreans remained a daily struggle, one that led each year to a climb up “the hill of barley,” the grim season of late winter and early spring when the autumn harvest’s reserves of rice and other food ran out, and families survived day to day, hand to mouth, until they could bring in the winter