Tuesday, May 20th, dawned with an uneasy tension looming over embattled Gwangju.
The morning was calm. It was overcast and raining lightly. Overnight, the Chun regime had transferred still more paratroopers to the city, bringing the troop numbers up to more than 3,000. They were badly outnumbered by the actively protesting citizens – more joined every hour, angered by the violence of the soldiers – but with the support of the city police Chun was confident that the movement could be stamped out before things got out of hand. At the same time, the chain of command seemed to realize that it had badly miscalculated with the True Heart tactics and was actively taking steps to de-escalate and defuse tensions. In the previous days, the citizens had muttered that the soldiers – most of whom came from outside Jeolla province – spoke with foreign accents and reeked of alcohol on their breath. Today, they noticed, the soldiers were sober, spoke politely, and conspicuously lacked the bayonets they had carried the previous two days.
But it was far too late now for mere courtesy to stop things. Events had taken on a momentum all their own, and Gwangju was barrelling towards a bloody confrontation. Away from the main streets, it was quiet. Shops were open, soldiers were absent – the busses were even still running. You could almost forget there was a revolution on. Downtown, though, things were different. Throughout the morning, crowds again gathered on Guemnamno, and by noon there were fully 100,000 citizens filling the boulevard. The rain slackened and was gone by lunch and soon an increasingly nervous line of police and soldiers was eyeing an enormous mass of people. Trigger fingers got itchy. At first everyone contented themselves with shouting and slogans, but as the afternoon wore on again the police resorted to tear gas in an effort to disperse the demonstrators.
The result was a running street battle that in the end lasted more than a day. A pattern developed to the fighting: The police and soldiers would fire gas, then wade in with their batons, driving the crowd back. The crowd would stumble backwards a few blocks. As they did, the crowd would sweep up curious souls who had come out to look at the ruckus, or people who were searching for missing friends and family members. Reinforced, the protestors would sweep back and as the gas dispersed drive the government forces back in turn. Up and down Guemnamno, as the afternoon wore into evening, this continued.
For many in Gwangju, there was a sense of frustration. The domestic media, tightly controlled by Chun and his cronies, made little mention of the violence in the city, beyond mention of riots promoted by North Korean agitators. Regional resentment ran high – once again, no one much cared what happened in Jeolla, it seemed. No one would have tolerated such violence against the citizens of Seoul or Busan. But those hicks in Gwangju? Probably had it coming. Everyone know that only a baton could get through their thick skulls anyway.
In addition, there was confusion and dismay about the role of the United States. For many protestors, the endgame depended on US intervention. The Americans supported democracy, loudly, and had constantly reigned in the excesses of Seoul before. When they saw what Chun was doing to the people of Gwangju, they would order him to put a stop to it, and Chun would have no choice but to comply. And yet…three days in, and the US had still done nothing. No soldiers had come to protect the citizens.
They concluded, naively, that the US most likely simply didn’t know enough about what was happening in the city. This impression was largely correct. There was only one American official in the city – David Miller, who worked at the American Cultural Center. The Embassy in Seoul had ordered him to remain indoors for his own safety. Shut away in his office, he knew little about what was happening in the streets outside, and only fragmentary reports of violence and bayonetings of students by paratroopers reached the embassy. Official Korean sources downplayed the violence, as mentioned. The atmosphere in Seoul was sullen and tense, but non-violent, and so through these days the embassy missed the significance of the developing events in the southwest.*
The citizens could, at least, take matters into their own hands regarding domestic news. Some began to print and distribute leaflets of their own around th city, countering the regime propaganda. Yun Sang Won had previously been a teacher of night classes. Now he put his writing skills to good use, writing and distributing these “Fighters’ Circulars”, which served to unite and inform most of the protestors. Yun would be among those killed during the fighting.
The climax on May 20 came at 7 pm. By early evening, the city police had been deserting to the side of the protestors in droves and the paratroopers had been driven back into a tight cordon around the Provincial Office itself. They held their perimeter there, for awhile, terribly outnumbered but much better armed than the protestors, who had no real way to break through their lines, no heavy equipment of their own. Then, in the distance, both sides heard a horrible din, loud of enough to drown out even the noise of the crowd. It was honking – the sound of hundreds and hundreds of bus, truck, and car horns repeatedly leaning on the horn, over and over again. It was loud, and growing louder, and soon, behind the crowd, headlights became visible – hundreds of headlights, all moving steadily towards the Provincial Hall. The drivers of Gwangju had chosen a side.
Taxi drivers had been instrumental throughout the early days of the uprising. Their little cars were indispensable, shuttling protestors back and forth, delivering supplies, and, most importantly, carrying the wounded (and dead) to hospitals for treatment. The job was not without risk, as some of the soldiers didn’t take kindly to the wounded being treated. Their policy had generally been to leave them lying in the street while they pushed on in search of more heads to break, more arrests to make. So, some drivers had been assaulted and injured as they attempted to carry off the injured for aid.
This did not sit well with a small group of cab drivers (again, I share names when I have them. English sources are so spotty and unreliable). They sent word flashing out along the driver network, calling for an assembly of all the cab and bus drivers of Gwangju at Mudeung Stadium, one of the largest outdoor venues downtown, a short drive from the battle on Guemnamno. As the sun sank towards the horizon on May 20, hundreds assembled – the parking lot was filled with dozens of busses and hundreds of cabs. The cab drivers spoke persuasively, arguing that the drivers of the city could no longer remain neutral. The soldiers wouldn’t let them. They had to pick a side and fight for their rights, just as much as the students did.
A few minutes later, a massive convoy departed from the stadium. They drove south, down what is today Gwangju’s Baseball street, a quiet avenue lined with plaques and portraits celebrating heroes of the Kia Tigers. A few blocks later, the convoy, city and express busses in the lead, taxis coming behind, turned left and advanced towards the still-surging crowds and violence around Provincial Hall. In the early twilight, they switched on their headlights, and leaned on the horns. The din could be heard for miles around, it is said.
As the convoy eased through the crowd of protestors, the citizens celebrated, waving flags, leaping among the cars – one brave young man even mounted the lead bus as they drove straight at the paratroopers. A photographer caught him, standing there, preserved for all time as one of the most iconic images of the Uprising.
It was not without risk. The soldiers fired more tear gas at the drivers. Some vehicles lost control and drove through the cordon of troops. The paratroopers smashed at the headlights with their batons, dragged drivers out and beat them. When the drivers kept coming, one or another of the jumpy troops finally lost his nerve. He leveled his rifle, and opened fire. The first shots of the uprising had been fired.
Among the drivers that day was Kim Pong-man. A quiet, middle-aged man, Kim worked for the Hyundai Transportation Company. He had been transporting the injured to hospitals for days now. At the moment, he lived alone – his mother in law had just died, so his wife was out of town with their two children, a 3-year old and a 1-month old. He kept in touch with his landlady to let her know when he was going out into the chaos, in case anything happened to him.
Kim had attended the rally at Mudeung Stadium, and he was afire with determination for the cause. It wasn’t right, what the soldiers were doing. He’d tried to live quietly, to keep his head down and out of politics – but people were dying now, and Kim could sit out no longer. He had never been a great man. He never would be a great man – the councils of the wise and mighty would never be troubled about the life of one bus driver in one small city. But he didn’t have to be great to do this. When the convoy left, Kim’s bus was in the lead.
That night, Kim never called in to report to his land lady.
His wife rushed home when she heard. It took her more than 3 days to slip through the complex network of roadblocks around Gwangju and enter the city, which by that time was under a full state of siege. How she navigated that journey with a toddler and an infant in tow must have been an epic in itself – but the details, sadly, are known only to her. What is known is that when she returned on the 24th, she found Kim’s body already placed in a coffin, in a gymnasium with the other dead across from the Provincial Hall. He had been shot. Kim’s memorial record states,
“After confirming he was dead, she wailed, venting her resentment. Nothing could completely rid her of her sorrow short of her desire to follow after her dead husband. But her two children were too young for her to do that…Whenever she is reminded of the uncertainty of life, Mrs. Kang Song Sun, who has lost her husband, goes with her two children to the [5.18 Memorial] cemetery.”
– 5.18 Memorial Foundation
Kang Song Sun was not the only one wailing that day. Around the city, sporadic gunfire had broken out as isolated pockets of troops were overwhelmed by protestors. There were shootings at Chosun University, and at the Tax Office. At the train station, the soldiers killed two more protestors and left their bodies to rot in the building.
The protestors themselves were rapidly becoming more organized and fighting back. Young men in Korea are universally conscripted, and so most of the young male protestors had army experience. These veterans became rallying points, organizing small groups of people and leading them to strategic points, fighting back with whatever weapons came to hand – bricks, stones, vehicles. That night, the fighting in the city was general. Key supports of the regime – the television stations broadcasting propaganda, the tax offices, government administration buildings – were targeted and burned. The paratroopers were safe only moving in large groups, and gradually overnight they were increasingly driven solely into the blocks around the Provincial Office downtown. Fires blazed all around town, and the sound of gunfire was general. Gwangju was in a state of full insurrection, and outside the city the army was already putting into place roadblocks to cut the unruly city off from the rest of the country.
The intervention of the drivers was a decisive moment in Gwangju – for many, it was the moment that it went from the May 18 protests to the May 18 Uprising. An entire profession and social class had abruptly thrown their weight to the side of the revolution – in so doing, they made the uprising general. No longer was it just a matter of students and ordinary citizens caught up in the whirlwind. Now the common populace increasingly joined, so that the evening of May 20 saw most of the population in arms against the soldiers. Today, May 20 is remembered as Drivers of Democracy day in Gwangju. They paid for their intervention – the drivers made up 14% of all the dead during the Uprising, most from this single demonstration.
The situation for the regime was extremely precarious. There were no more reserves immediately available to reinforce the paratroopers already in Gwangju. Any further troops would require drawdowns elsewhere – which would in turn create the danger of uprisings in the cities with weakened garrisons, or would require US approval to move troops guarding the DMZ. Publicly, the military command remained defiant, and would make every effort to hold the city the next day. Quietly, though, they began to draw up plans for a full-scale abandonment of Gwangju.
*The US also had a lot on its plate at the time. Around the same time that the paratroopers started bayonetting college students, Mt. St. Helens, in northwest Washington, dramatically erupted, killing some 50 odd Americans in the most deadly volcanic eruption in American history. Most American news networks were occupied with the domestic news and had no time for protests in an obscure Asian city halfway around the world.
Gwangju Dreaming 