Like many other wars, “the Korean war is multiple wars” (p. ix); it not only involved many participating countries but also encompassed diverse motives and narratives. It started as a civil war between the two Koreas but later developed into an international war. And though the Korean War officially ended in July 1953, the conflict still goes on along the borderline and in the minds of the Korean people. Multiplicity of the war narrative is a natural result of contestations among its participants, especially survivors. As such, the questions of who started the war and how it should be remembered have become fields of another war. The opposing forces in the war, however, try to make its narrative as simple as possible by counterposing the “virtuous us” and the “evil them.” This is exactly what the official state narrative of South Korea (and North Korea) purported: the war started in June 25, 1950, because of the invasion of the communists in North Korea. Thus was made the binary frame of the war, North Korea as the evil invader on the one hand, South Korea as the innocent victim and the United States as the righteous savior on the other. This book contains six excellent essays that challenge this conventional narrative of the war.

Unlike most current studies on the subject, which focus on the causes (or origins) of the war, this book focuses on two other aspects: the state's violent suppression of its own (or allied) people, and the collective memories of the people under the harsh and brutal control of the state. The first two essays, by Kim Dong-Choon and Suh Hee-Kyong respectively, delineate how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea (hereinafter, the TRCK) endeavored to collect various cases of state violence surrounding the Korean War. Being members of the TRCK, the authors were in an advantageous position to testify to the difficulty of establishing the commission and of collecting evidence and testimonies to support petitions submitted by the descendants of war massacres, and prove the pervasiveness of state violence committed during the war both by the ROK and the United States.

When such instances occurred, the state made every effort to hide or misrepresent its violence against victims. The United States is no exception in this respect, but rather more skillful in morally legitimating its own atrocities. In his essay, Charles J. Henry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, debunked the “inconvenient truths” in the U.S. government investigation report on the No Gun Ri massacre that happened in July 1950. After killing hundreds of refugees in the remote village, the U.S. Army first denied its brutality and then, once an investigation was inevitable due to the Associated Press report on the incident, tried to hide, ignore, destroy, and misrepresent important evidence to avoid their accountability. Furthermore, Lisa Yoneyama argues that the violence of the United States in this war is almost impossible to redress, since it is “deeply rooted in what can be called the American myth of rescue, liberation, and rehabilitation, a powerful narrative structure that has rationalized the subjugation and bondage of Asia to the United States” (p. 131).

The remaining essay by Jeon Seung-Hee shifts the readers' attention to the experience of ordinary citizens and their representations of the war as reflected in cultural artifacts, especially Park Wan-sŏ's novels and a multimedia exhibit entitled “Still Present Pasts.” The author eloquently shows that in these representations the distinction between the evil and the good, as it was emphasized in the mainstream discourse and some counter-discourses, was elusive and in many occasions entirely meaningless since the two concepts constantly changed their manifestations as the war's situations changed. Rather, the Korean people were shrewd enough to learn how to survive these cruel circumstances by not adhering to the good and eventually transcending the binary frame of the good and the evil, although the state kept asking them to stick to the ostensible good even when it did not safeguard the good anymore.

This book will greatly contribute to the studies of the Korean War by suggesting a very effective way of challenging the hegemonic view, in which South Korea is simply depicted as the victim and the United States as the savior. It is more realistic in the study of the war to assume that the boundary between the good and the bad is always prone to disappear and even the supposed good is not immune from committing atrocities. In this sense, the book sufficiently testifies to the cruelty of the war by revealing the various occasions of state violence, and more generally how the state could betray its own people at very critical moments. The book will certainly be an essential addition to the reading list of Korean War studies.

Despite its positive contributions, however, the book also poses a very perplexing question: can the state rectify its own wrongdoings during the war? It is customary that states establish a truth and reconciliation commission to rectify their historical misconduct after the inception of democratization, as in South Africa, some Latin American countries, and South Korea. It is also expected, however, that the activities of the commission will be significantly hindered and retarded by other state agencies due to the fact that their interests are deeply embedded in neglecting or hiding such past wrong-doings. Who, if not the state, can redress the malfunctioning of the state and its violence against innocent people during the war? This is still an unresolved question in the study of the Korean War. This book lays a good foundation upon which further studies on this and other related issues can be pursued.