Reenacting Survivors’ Bodies in the No Gun Ri Peace Park

The No Gun Ri Peace Park was built in 2012 to honor civilian victims of the No Gun Ri Killings, a wartime atrocity committed by US troops. Survivors and victims’ families had been silenced until Associated Press journalists published their story in 1999 and subsequently earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Investigative Reporting. As a durable war mnemonic in a public site, the park is now performing the critical roles that survivors and victims’ families once carried: witnessing, performing, and transferring trauma to others. This chapter explores not only how the park reenacts survivors’ bodies in communicating a traumatic event that most visitors did not experience directly, but also how it—as a newly constructed sign—negotiates meanings of the No Gun Ri Bridge, the original site of the killings that is located adjacent to the park.