The Shadow of Arms

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Hwang Sok-yong’s The Shadow of Arms, when first begun in 1983, was a courageous act of political witness. Under a ferocious dictatorship, the Vietnam War remained a taboo subject except as an anti-Communist crusade. Not only had “our boys” fought and died there in great numbers, but President Chun Doo Hwan himself, along with his closest aides, was a veteran of that war. And while the larger issue of anti-imperialism and national liberation was being hotly debated in the Korean radical movements, especially among students, in the wake of the Kwangju massacre of May 1980 when General Chun came to power, such debate met with frequent and harsh repression. And here was Hwang serializing in a well-known monthly magazine a novel of the Vietnam War which exposed the atrocities and corruption of the Allied war effort, clearly sympathizing with the cause of the National Liberation Front. Little wonder, then, that once the first half was finished and came out in book form in 1985, the project remained in abeyance until after the success of the nationwide election protest actions of June 1987.

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