The Korean War is sometimes referred to as The Forgotten War, bracketed as it was by the larger World War II and the more domestically contentious Vietnam War. But a recent Associated Press report suggests the Pentagon and the American public need to revisit Korea of the early 1950s to re-examine our history and perception of it.

According to an AP investigation, early in the war U.S. troops came upon a railroad bridge near the town of No Gun Ri, about 100 miles from Seoul. Hiding under the bridge after an air attack was a large number of Koreans, clearly civilian, many of them small children. Many, but not all, of the Americans began to shoot them.

Some estimates put the number of civilians killed at 100, others as high as 300. The Pentagon might list the number as zero because it has no record of any such massacre. It is only through the insistence of South Korean villagers that a public memory exists at all. Privately, however, soldiers carried their memories like old wounds.

Edward L. Daily of Clarksville, Tenn., said this: “On summer nights when the breeze is blowing, I can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming.”

Herman Patterson of Greer, S.C., remembered the bridge: “It was just wholesale slaughter,” he reports.

Ret. Col. Robert M. Carroll recalls, “There weren’t any North Koreans in there the first day, I’ll tell you that. It was mainly women and kids and old men.”

Chun Choon Ji, then a 12-year-old girl, hid among the corpses. “The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies.”

The United States does not know what happened at No Gun Ri because it never officially asked. But if its own soldiers — not one or two but a dozen of them — are to be believed, the investigation and full public report now called by Defense Secretary William Cohen easily is warranted. Its results must also fairly describe the context in which these events are said to have taken place and the military’s reaction at the time. Such a report must be undertaken soon, while the soldiers and survivors are still around to tell their stories.