Documentary spotlights Peace Corps Volunteer’s role in Gwangju Uprising

The 1980 Gwangju Uprising produced a great many memorable photos, not least of which was one of a young man with blonde hair helping carry a man on a stretcher through the streets. The identity of this foreigner remained a mystery for decades, but as U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers (PCV) who were there began publishing their memoirs, his identity and role in the uprising gradually came into focus.

The person in the photo was a PCV named Tim Warnberg, who had arrived in Korea in 1978 to work as a health volunteer at Gwangju Christian Hospital. Those who knew him before his arrival in Korea remember him as someone whose character and concern for others help explain his actions in 1980.

Warnberg was from Brainerd, Minnesota, where his father was the town’s longest-serving sheriff. His mother was, as his sister Roxanne Wilson remembers, “devoted to caring for others” and creating “a home that was warm and inviting to neighbors, friends and persons in need.” As his closest childhood friend, Keevie Fairbanks, put it, “Tim was the best of both of his parents.”

Robert Grotjohn, who attended high school and university with Warnberg, said, “He was one of the most liked and admired people in our high school, someone who showed kindness and consideration to everyone.” His sister also remembers him as a gifted athlete who “spent summers working as a camp counselor for kids with diabetes” while other summers were spent “hitchhiking around the country.” As Fairbanks put it, “His curiosity was unmatched. And he stood up for people — he stood up for me. That’s the type of person he was.”

When he didn’t do well enough on the Medical College Admission Test after graduating from the University of Minnesota, according to his sister he decided to go into the Peace Corps to improve his chances for medical school admission — a decisive turn that changed the course of his future.

“His placement in Korea provided him with one of the great joys of his life,” she said. “He loved the language, culture and friends he made. His work with people who were diagnosed with Hansen’s disease was meaningful. I think the whole experience transformed his perception of the world.”

Warnberg quickly became known for his language ability. As Paul Courtright, who arrived as a health volunteer in Naju, South Jeolla Province, in 1979, said, “I think many of us asked ourselves, ‘Why can’t we speak Korean as well as Tim does?’ His Korean was excellent.”

Warnberg agreed to provide support for one of the Hansen’s disease resettlement villages Courtright was assigned to, and while visiting the village together, they found themselves in the middle of a blizzard. “Tim was happy to be there, as his work in Gwangju was at the university teaching hospital and he did not have as many opportunities to get out into the field,” Courtright said, despite the blizzard.

He did find other opportunities in the city, however, including befriending John and Jean Underwood, who lived in the city’s missionary compound. Grotjohn remembers, “Tim was leading the Kwangju Volunteer Corps, a group of medical students from Chonnam University who would go on Saturdays to a local institution housing mentally challenged people. The students cleaned the living facilities and engaged the people there in warm human contact, which is what Tim shared with everyone. Tim wrote a letter directly to the Blue House about the deplorable conditions in which those people lived.”

When student protests began in downtown Gwangju on May 18, 1980, Warnberg watched from the sidelines for hours, until suddenly paratroopers arrived and blocked the street. “At precisely that moment the soldiers charged and began swinging their clubs,” he wrote. “We ran with the panicked crowd and I ended up in a small store along with about 15 other people, including one other PCV. A soldier came into the store and proceeded to club everyone over the head with his truncheon until he came to the other volunteer and me. He stopped, startled, hesitated a moment and then ran out.”

Warnberg omitted what followed, but John Underwood’s account, written in secret and sent to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, explained the “non-violent intervention” carried out by Warnberg: “A PCV seeing a person being beaten would go and put their arms around the person, thus being in the way of further beating. On such an occasion the attacker would leave his victim but choose another, who in his turn would be protected by a PCV who put his arms around him.”

The next day, Warnberg was present when paratroopers charged a crowd and began to beat them. As he described it, “In the ensuing panic, a middle-aged housewife screamed to me for help as a soldier tried to wrest her teenage son away. I managed to convince the soldier to let the boy go, but not until he rapped the boy on the head and struck me across the face with his club.”

After returning to the main street, “A Korean doctor approached me and asked if I would help carry the wounded to his clinic. The soldiers had sealed off the streets and forced all of the wounded to sit in the middle of the street, some of them badly injured … We pushed our way through the troops and were able to take some of the worst cases to the clinic.” It was at this time that the well-known photo of him was taken from a nearby rooftop by Jeonnam Maeil reporter Na Gyeong-taek.

Warnberg spent much of the next two days outside of the city and returned after the soldiers opened fire on protesters and protesters began arming themselves, forcing the army to retreat to the city’s outskirts, a development journalist James Fenton called “an extraordinary event, an improbability, armed insurrection in one of the most authoritarian countries in the world.”

From that point, Warnberg and fellow PCVs Judi Chamberlin, David Dolinger and Paul Courtright began acting as guides and interpreters for the foreign journalists who arrived. As AP reporter Terry Anderson remembered of Warnberg, “He was generous with his time and his knowledge, and helped us any way he could to tell the story of the Kwangju Uprising. Tim was a kind young man who was justly angry at what he saw. We all liked him.”

As negotiations with the army proceeded in a tense atmosphere, Warnberg was quoted by name in an article by Boston Globe reporter Don Kirk as saying, “The only way they can retake this city is by massive bloodshed. The students cannot negotiate — it’s gotten out of control.”

After the uprising was put down with force, Warnberg finally managed to call his family, an event reported by his hometown paper, the Brainerd Dispatch. His father, Charles, was quoted as saying, “I was watching television one night and I could see machine guns on the top of the roof at the hospital where he worked.” Asked whether he had given his son “a little fatherly criticism” for refusing to leave, his father laughed and said, “He probably wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. He’s pretty independent. And compassionate.”

Not long after the uprising, Tim befriended Noren Lush, a PCV who worked at the health clinic in Gimje, North Jeolla Province. As Lush remembered, “After our Peace Corps service ended in 1981, we hung out a lot. We both taught at the foreign language school at Yonsei University, and also studied Korean there. I also worked at the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) and I would drag Tim along on RAS tours that I led or on scouting trips for new tours. In 1985 we both decided to leave Korea for grad school in Hawaii.”

While working on his MA in Korean studies at the University of Hawaii, Warnberg published the first academic article about 5.18, “The Kwangju Uprising: An Inside View,” in the journal Korean Studies in 1987. For his MA work, he focused on translating the modern “sijo” poems of Jo Jong-hyeon’s 1969 collection “Earth at Midnight.”

In early 1992, not long after journalist Terry Anderson was released from six years of captivity in Lebanon, Warnberg wrote him a letter as “a welcome back to ‘the world’” and updated him on his life: “I received my Master’s and was working on my Ph.D. when I got the devastating news that I have AIDS. I returned home to my family in Minnesota and have somewhat improved but the disease is slowly taking its toll. I have thought back to the events in my life which have profoundly affected me and I think of those chaotic days in Kwangju.” Warnberg had hoped Anderson might still have the audio tape of their May 1980 interview, but was unable to recover it.

As his sister, Roxanne, remembered, “Coming home was challenging for him. He talked about what a shock it was to go from one world to another.” During the last year of his life, he befriended Susan Cunningham-Jopling, a Korean adoptee, who said that “he looked forward to sharing his Korean experience with me.” Due to his experiences with adopted Korean children, she said, “He truly was a bridge, anchored as he was with a foot planted firmly in each culture,” and “could put the two worlds together in a way that I could understand.”

Warnberg passed away on Feb. 7, 1993. “Tim did a lot in his too-short life, and he was poised to do a lot more in the academic world, as he had finished the dissertation that he was never able to defend before he was lost to the AIDS epidemic,” Grotjohn said.

Edward Shultz, a K-1 PCV who later became a history professor at the University of Hawaii, said, “I remember him well and was saddened by his death. He had a lot to contribute.”

As the decades passed, the memory of Warnberg’s role in the Gwangju Uprising and in Korean studies began to fade, but this began to change in the 2020s. Memoirs by Courtright and Dolinger about their experiences during 5.18, as well as a series of articles by OhmyNews in 2020, helped bring him greater recognition.

Last year, after several unsuccessful attempts to retrieve Warnberg’s academic writing from aging floppy disks that his sister, Roxanne, had lent him, Dolinger finally succeeded in recovering numerous papers, along with translations of poetry and short stories. This led to the publication in this year’s RAS Korea journal, Transactions, of Warnberg’s mid-1980s interview with Salome Han, a Korean immigrant to Hawaii who befriended Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee.

Earlier this year, an even more stunning discovery was made in the 5.18 Archives — a long-lost filmed interview with Tim Warnberg, recorded on May 24, 1980, by German journalist Jürgen Hinzpeter, whose story was highlighted in the 2017 hit film “A Taxi Driver.” This interview has become the centerpiece of a new documentary about Warnberg titled “My Name is Won Deok-gi” — the Korean name he was given during his Peace Corps service — which had its premiere on Oct. 23.

The director, So Jung-han, who discovered the photo of Warnberg in 2019 and contributed to the 2020 OhmyNews articles, interviewed Warnberg’s family and friends in the U.S. while his home state of Minnesota was experiencing scenes of violence involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with the final film interweaving footage of the two instances of resistance to state violence.

More than three decades after his death, the rediscovery of Warnberg’s writing and the footage of his 1980 interview may finally bring greater recognition to his life and contributions.

“My Name is Won Deok-gi” will screen at Hongdae Indie Space on Saturday at 7:30 p.m., and Gwangju Theater in Jeonnam-Gwangju Special Metropolitan City on Nov. 14 at 7:30 p.m.

Matt VanVolkenburg has a master’s degree in Korean studies from the University of Washington. He is the blogger behind populargusts.blogspot.kr, and co-author of “Called by Another Name: A Memoir of the Gwangju Uprising.”