{"id":13971,"date":"2026-11-05T22:28:28","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T22:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/?p=13971"},"modified":"2026-11-05T22:28:28","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T22:28:28","slug":"documentary-spotlights-peace-corps-volunteers-role-in-gwangju-uprising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/?p=13971","title":{"rendered":"Documentary spotlights Peace Corps Volunteer’s role in Gwangju Uprising"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>10 Minute, 45 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>


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West German correspondent J\u00fcrgen Hinzpeter, left, and U.S. Peace Corps volunteers prepare for Tim Warnberg\u2019s interview on a rooftop in Gwangju, May 24, 1980. Courtesy of May 18 Memorial Foundation<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Warnberg was from Brainerd, Minnesota, where his father was the town\u2019s longest-serving sheriff. His mother was, as his sister Roxanne Wilson remembers, \u201cdevoted to caring for others\u201d and creating \u201ca home that was warm and inviting to neighbors, friends and persons in need.\u201d As his closest childhood friend, Keevie Fairbanks, put it, \u201cTim was the best of both of his parents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robert Grotjohn, who attended high school and university with Warnberg, said, \u201cHe was one of the most liked and admired people in our high school, someone who showed kindness and consideration to everyone.\u201d His sister also remembers him as a gifted athlete who \u201cspent summers working as a camp counselor for kids with diabetes\u201d while other summers were spent \u201chitchhiking around the country.\u201d As Fairbanks put it, \u201cHis curiosity was unmatched. And he stood up for people \u2014 he stood up for me. That’s the type of person he was.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 a decisive turn that changed the course of his future.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis 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\u2019s disease was meaningful. I think the whole experience transformed his perception of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Tim Warnberg, left, and Paul Courtright visit Hohaewon in Naju, South Jeolla Province, 1979. Courtright published his memoir titled “Witnessing Gwangju” in 2020. Courtesy of Paul Courtright<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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, \u201cI think many of us asked ourselves, \u2018Why can\u2019t we speak Korean as well as Tim does?\u2019 His Korean was excellent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warnberg agreed to provide support for one of the Hansen\u2019s disease resettlement villages Courtright was assigned to, and while visiting the village together, they found themselves in the middle of a blizzard. \u201cTim 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,\u201d Courtright said, despite the blizzard.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cTim 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cAt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warnberg omitted what followed, but John Underwood\u2019s account, written in secret and sent to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, explained the \u201cnon-violent intervention\u201d carried out by Warnberg: \u201cA 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next day, Warnberg was present when paratroopers charged a crowd and began to beat them. As he described it, \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

After returning to the main street, \u201cA 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 \u2026 We pushed our way through the troops and were able to take some of the worst cases to the clinic.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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Tim Warnberg carries a wounded citizen to Chonnam University Hospital in Gwangju, May 19, 1980, in this iconic photo by Na Kyung-taek. Courtesy of May 18 Memorial Foundation<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2019s outskirts, a development journalist James Fenton called \u201can extraordinary event, an improbability, armed insurrection in one of the most authoritarian countries in the world.\u201d <\/p>\n

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, \u201cHe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201cThe only way they can retake this city is by massive bloodshed. The students cannot negotiate \u2014 it’s gotten out of control.\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201cI was watching television one night and I could see machine guns on the top of the roof at the hospital where he worked.\u201d Asked whether he had given his son \u201ca little fatherly criticism\u201d for refusing to leave, his father laughed and said, \u201cHe probably wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. He\u2019s pretty independent. And compassionate.\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201cAfter 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

While working on his MA in Korean studies at the University of Hawaii, Warnberg published the first academic article about 5.18, \u201cThe Kwangju Uprising: An Inside View,\u201d 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.”<\/p>\n

In early 1992, not long after journalist Terry Anderson was released from six years of captivity in Lebanon, Warnberg wrote him a letter as \u201ca welcome back to \u2018the world\u2019\u201d and updated him on his life: \u201cI received my Master\u2019s 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.\u201d Warnberg had hoped Anderson might still have the audio tape of their May 1980 interview, but was unable to recover it.<\/p>\n

As his sister, Roxanne, remembered, \u201cComing home was challenging for him. He talked about what a shock it was to go from one world to another.\u201d During the last year of his life, he befriended Susan Cunningham-Jopling, a Korean adoptee, who said that \u201che looked forward to sharing his Korean experience with me.\u201d Due to his experiences with adopted Korean children, she said, \u201cHe truly was a bridge, anchored as he was with a foot planted firmly in each culture,\u201d and \u201ccould put the two worlds together in a way that I could understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warnberg passed away on Feb. 7, 1993. \u201cTim 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,\u201d Grotjohn said. <\/p>\n

Edward Shultz, a K-1 PCV who later became a history professor at the University of Hawaii, said, \u201cI remember him well and was saddened by his death. He had a lot to contribute.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Tim Warnberg and David Dolinger visit a Hansen\u2019s disease village near Gwangju. Courtesy of Roxanne Wilson<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the decades passed, the memory of Warnberg\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Last year, after several unsuccessful attempts to retrieve Warnberg\u2019s 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\u2019s RAS Korea journal, Transactions, of Warnberg\u2019s mid-1980s interview with Salome Han, a Korean immigrant to Hawaii who befriended Korea\u2019s first president, Syngman Rhee.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, an even more stunning discovery was made in the 5.18 Archives \u2014 a long-lost filmed interview with Tim Warnberg, recorded on May 24, 1980, by German journalist J\u00fcrgen 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” \u2014 the Korean name he was given during his Peace Corps service \u2014 which had its premiere on Oct. 23.<\/p>\n