From Quảng Nam to Gwangju: Confronting the Bloody History of South Korea's 'Vietnam'

In her novel Human Acts, the renowned South Korean author and Nobel Prize recipient Han Kang writes about the May 18 Democratization Movement, also known as the Gwangju Uprising. That month, student-led demonstrations broke out in the city of Gwangju following army general Chun Doo-hwan’s coup d'état, and his military government responded with a violent crackdown and an indiscriminate massacre of civilians. 

In one of the chapters in Human Acts, set in 1990, a university professor interviews an unnamed narrator who had previously been imprisoned and tortured. Upon being asked about a photo depicting a line of dead children from the massacre, the narrator recounts the story behind the harrowing image:

Han Kang’s depiction of the ruthless and cold-blooded violence is jarring. But what is perhaps additionally surprising is the novel’s reference to Vietnam. 

Students captured by soldiers after a raid during the Gwangju Uprising. Photo via The New York Times.

Human Acts is not the only novel by Han Kang that references the “Vietnam War” — as it is known in South Korea, instead of the “American War” in Vietnam. Two of her other major novels, The Vegetarian and We Do Not Part, also make references to the war.

Perhaps her most famous novel, The Vegetarian centers around Yeong-hye, who turns vegetarian and refuses any engagement with meat after dreams involving the slaughter of animals. Towards the end of the first chapter, narrated by Yeong-hye’s husband, Yeong-hye’s father becomes infuriated with Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat. In a disturbing sequence of events, her father slaps her and tries to “thrust” a piece of pork into her mouth with his fingers, after which Yeong-hye slits her wrists, resulting in her hospitalization. For her father, Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism is a disgrace, most of all to the patriarchy, inconveniencing the diet and lifestyle of her husband.

Like the officer in Human Acts, Yeong-hye’s father, too, is a veteran of the Vietnam War, described at one point by Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law as a “Vietnam War hero.” Here, again, Han Kang appears to link violence within Korea, this time patriarchal in form instead of authoritarian, to a history of violence abroad.

Han Kang delivering a keynote speech at the International Congress of Writers Writing in Korean, in Gwangju, 2023. Photo via Korea Herald.

The third novel worth mentioning is We Do Not Part, which follows Kyungha’s journey to Jeju Island upon the request of her friend Inseon. The central topic of the novel is the Jeju massacre that took place on the island from 1948 to 1954. Between April 1948 and May 1949, what is known as the Jeju Uprising broke out in protest against US-run elections, which the island’s residents feared would further entrench the division of the two Koreas (which it did). Under the premise of cracking down on communist collaborators, military and police forces under the US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGK) massacred civilians, resulting in an estimate of between 25,000 and 30,000 deaths. 

Like her other two novels, Han Kang again alludes to the Vietnam War in We Do Not Part. Part of the novel’s premise is that Kyungha’s friend Inseon is a documentarian and filmmaker who previously worked on a series of interviews with Vietnamese women who had been the victims of sexual violence perpetrated by Korean troops during the Vietnam War. 

What explains the repeated allusions to the Vietnam War? What do they reveal? What are these traces symptomatic of? Though certainly motivated by Han Kang’s works, I should note that my questions are not literary so much as historical. In answering these questions, we must thus first confront the history of Korea's participation in the Vietnam War: a past that Korea has yet to properly reckon with, and one that turns out to be far closer to home than most Koreans realize. Korean violence in Vietnam must be regarded as part of the same apparatus of violence that also brought about the massacres in Jeju and Gwangju. The glimpses of Vietnam in Han Kang are the hauntings of a past that Korea has for too long neglected to face.

South Korea in the Vietnam War

Despite not being so widely discussed, South Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War was significant in multiple facets. Between 1965 and 1973, South Korea deployed 320,000 troops to support the US-backed Republic of Vietnam, making it the second-largest foreign participant in the war, second only to the US.

South Korea’s participation was, in part, ideological. Like Vietnam, Korea was one of the “hot” zones in the so-called global cold war. Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian and militant rule, which spanned the whole of South Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War, was staunchly anti-communist, as was the case for both dictatorships that preceded and followed Park’s, during which the Jeju and Gwangju massacres occurred, respectively.

Former President Park Chung-hee (black suit) greets ROK Army personnel during their deployment in Vietnam. Photo via Korea Pro.

But Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War was also heavily driven by economic interests. Park’s initial push to offer South Korean military personnel was strategic, with a broader vision in mind of eventually landing favorable terms to access the US military-industrial complex. Indeed, the Johnson administration repaid the favor. In addition to paying Korean troops in Vietnam rates 22 times greater than regular Korean military pay, the Johnson administration also procured preferred treatment for Korea under the State Department’s offshore procurement program (OSP): a strategic program of procuring goods and services from foreign countries. This proved hugely significant for Korea's economic development. In the late 1960s, OSP and the US’s Military Assistance Program (MAP) collectively comprised between 40% and 60% of South Korea's gross capital formation, while chaebol conglomerates like Hyundai derived as much as 77% of their total profits from military contracts between 1963 and 1966. 

South Korea’s ascent from one of the world’s poorest countries to one of East Asia’s “tiger” economies is often referred to as “the miracle on the Han River.” But the term “miracle” mystifies too much. In many ways, South Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War constitutes no small part of the story of the country’s rapid economic boom that began in the 1960s.

A South Korean soldier in Bồng Sơn. Photo via The New York Times.

But as with any war-derived profit, the economic benefits South Korea gained from the Vietnam War were built upon, and remain inseparable from, the tremendous violence that had been perpetrated by South Korean troops. The atrocities that the US committed in Vietnam are well known: carpet bombings, the use of Agent Orange, torture and sexual violence, as well as indiscriminate massacres, including, most famously, the Mỹ Lai massacre. But though less well known, South Korea perpetrated many of the same atrocities, including brutal massacres of villages and rape of countless women. Korean soldiers in Vietnam gained a reputation for being “harsh, ferocious, even brutal,” such that even Americans viewed the Koreans with a measure of fear. 

Among the atrocities that Korean troops committed in Vietnam are the following: In December of 1966, South Korea troops murdered 430 unarmed civilians, 166 among them children, in Bình Hòa Village in Quảng Ngãi Province. In February 1968, South Korean marines also killed 151 civilians in Hà My Village in Quảng Nam Province. Of those murdered, 60 were children under the age of 10 and many were women. In the same month, South Korean marines also murdered more than 70 civilians in Phong Nhị-Phong Nhất, also in Quảng Nam. Photos documented by US troops, who entered the village shortly after the South Korean troops left, show brutal images of children shot dead, women with their breasts cut off, and burned corpses. The group Justice for Lai Dai Han continues to campaign for South Korea’s recognition of the rape of women by Korean soldiers and the tens of thousands of children who were born as a result. One such victim, Trần Thị Ngải, recounts the horrors of a Korean soldier forcing his way into her home and raping her at age 24, “he pulled me inside the room, closed the door and raped me repeatedly. He had a gun on his body and I was terrified.” 

From Vietnam to Gwangju

The story of Korean violence in Vietnam, however, did not simply end with the withdrawal of its troops — for it eventually found its way back home, to Gwangju. In seeking to justify the expansion of martial law that enabled the subsequent violent crackdown on Gwangju, South Korea’s minister of national defense at the time described the state of the country as akin to the early stages of Vietnam. In the eyes of Chun Doo-hwan’s military government, the threat of communism spanned borders: the events in Saigon that occurred just years prior loomed as what must be prevented at all costs, spurring violent military action. 

South Korean citizens in Seoul welcome soldiers home from Vietnam on March 20, 1973. Photo via Korea Pro.

In fact, Chun Doo-hwan, the head of the military coup, as well as other notable figures in his military government such as Roh Tae-woo — who would eventually succeed Chun as president — had themselves served in the Vietnam War. In later assessing and analyzing the excessive use of force and violence by Chun’s government, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) cited their training and experience in the Vietnam War as a driving factor, even describing Gwangju as “Korea’s Mỹ Lai,” in which Korea’s own citizens were treated as foreign threats. In Vietnam, for both US and Korean soldiers, the alleged impossibility of distinguishing ordinary civilians from enemy soldiers in the context of guerilla warfare served to rationalize the indiscriminate murder of civilians. Precisely the same logic was applied in Gwangju. In his book Discourse on Colonialism, Afro-Martiniquan French poet and writer Aimé Césaire writes of the “boomerang effect”: the ways in which colonial violence abroad eventually returns to the metropole to be deployed against its own people. In South Korea’s case, its own military violence boomeranged back from Vietnam to Gwangju. 

But we can complicate things further. For it is not that violence simply boomeranged back from abroad. Rather, such violence already existed in Korea long before the Vietnam War, deployed on its own people via US-backed, staunchly anti-communist and anti-left authoritarianism, as had been the case for the Jeju massacre — which had been the result of the perpetuation of forms and methods of violence deployed by Japanese colonizers during its occupation of Korea. From this perspective, it is no wonder that Han Kang considers Human Acts and We Do Not Part to constitute “a pair.” Both novels invoke the Vietnam War because the atrocities committed in Vietnam and the civilian massacres of Jeju and Gwangju belong to the same historical matrix of state violence, driven by a logic of cold war counterinsurgency and aggressed by US-backed governments. This shared history was not lost when, in 2018, two victims, one of the Hà My massacre, and one of the Phong Nhị-Phong Nhất massacre, visited victims of the Jeju massacre and commented, "I had not realized that Jeju had experienced such pains. It broke my heart to witness a similar scene.”

Civilian protestors captured by troops in Gwangju. Photo via AP.

Jeju, Vietnam, and Gwangju exist in an interconnected web. In The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye's father "thrust[s]" a piece of pork at his daughter's lips, an act that unmistakably evokes sexual violence. It is a form of violence rooted in the same patriarchal system that enabled sexual violence in Vietnam — the subject of Inseon's documentary in We Do Not Part. It is also the same patriarchal system that Park’s regime invoked in mobilizing a “remasculinization” of the nation via the Vietnam War. And again, the violence committed by Korean troops in Vietnam remains inseparable from the atrocities of Jeju and Gwangju. The glimpses of Vietnam in Han Kang are brief and sparse, but together they point to historical connections that run far deeper than what the surface reveals.

A Moral Failure

Concerning the atrocities of Jeju and Gwangju, significant, though far from adequate, efforts have been made by the state to address the injustices and human rights violations, including, most notably, the trial of former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo (both of whom were convicted but eventually pardoned), as well as various truth commissions tasked to investigate the truth behind the events and give victims a public platform for testimony.

The same simply has not been true concerning the Vietnam War. Though several left-wing presidents have expressed regret for the pain and suffering Korea has caused during the war, South Korea has yet to make a formal apology to Vietnam. This comes even as the country recognizes the immense economic benefits it has gained through its participation in the Vietnam War. 

Against the state’s largely disappointing refusal to engage with the legacy of Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Korean civil society groups have long pushed to bring justice for victims and their families — specifically, ever since the progressive Korean newspaper Hankyoreh’s breakthrough investigations that began in 1999.

In recent years, there have been two noteworthy developments. On the one hand, there have been efforts to seek compensation for victims through the courts. In January 2025, Nguyễn Thị Thanh — one of the two aforementioned victims who visited Jeju Island, a survivor of the Phong Nhị-Phong Nhất massacre — received a favorable ruling after the South Korean government sought to appeal a lower court decision (a move which the Vietnamese government called “extremely regrettable”) requiring the government to pay more than KRW30 million, or approximately US$20,000. At the age of 8, the massacre left Nguyễn Thị Thanh orphaned and with an abdominal injury caused by a shot in the stomach.

Nguyễn Thị Thanh (right) and her uncle Nguyễn Đức Chơi (left), a witness to the same massacre, at a press conference prior to a hearing before the Seoul Central District Court on August 9, 2022. Photo via VICE.

Meanwhile, there has been a push to launch a formal investigation into the Hà My massacre under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Unfortunately, the TRC dismissed the request, citing lack of jurisdiction over incidents concerning foreign nationals outside Korea’s territory. Since then, five victims and bereaved family members of the massacre filed an appeal to challenge the dismissal, but in August 2025, the appeal was rejected in a lower court decision. Lawyers representing the victims plan to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

Indeed, why the discrimination? Especially in the face of unthinkable violence, such a distinction feels utterly arbitrary. If anything, the brutal violence committed in Jeju, Gwangju, and Vietnam must be seen as one. The three are all connected in that the violence committed in each case had been a result of the same lineage of cold-war authoritarian dictatorships leading up to Korea’s democratization in 1987. Why is it that Korea has utterly failed to make progress in reckoning with its atrocities in Vietnam, unlike in Jeju and Gwangju? Vietnam is exceptional in that it laid the groundwork for Korea’s “miraculous” economic boom. The exception of Vietnam sends the message that violence, even at its most barbarous and heinous, remains permissible if it enables economic growth.

For the American anti-war movement, Vietnam has long served as a shorthand for the moral failings of US foreign interventionism. The Vietnam War is more often than not invoked as what must not be repeated elsewhere. Gwangju, likewise, occupies a similar psychic territory in Korean public memory. In a way, Gwangju is to Korea what Vietnam is to the US — both operate as “common nouns.” But as we have seen, the parallels run deeper than mere rhetoric or symbolism. Since its very beginning, Gwangju has already long been Korea’s “Vietnam.” Korea cannot properly reckon with injustices at home without reckoning with its injustices abroad. Korea must recognize, apologize, and compensate for its war crimes in Vietnam. All of it is long overdue.