On a cold February morning in 1951, Kim Woon-seop, a skinny 9-year-old, crawled down a ridge here that was flooded with blood.
Climbing over and through piles of dead bodies, trying to believe this was all a horrible dream, young Woon-seop sensed his life would never be the same as it was a few hours before. Soldiers had just slaughtered his family and people from his village, leaving the ridge bright red and certain no one was left breathing.
There was a tomb-like silence and the stench of gore coming from those who had once comprised Cheongyeon village in Geochang County, South Gyeongsang province.
What had hit little Woon-seop hardest that day was not the ear-splitting sound of the endless hail of machine gun fire. It was the uniforms of the people firing those machine guns ?khaki-green uniforms, the kind worn by the South Korean Army.
