Continuing a truly stellar run by USFK, YTN TV reports that at around 11:00 p.m. Saturday, a group of drunk, teenage children of USFK personnel was involved in a little misbehavior when one of their number threw a liquor bottle at a passing city bus, breaking its windshield. The incident took place in front of the War Memorial in Yongsan. According to the driver, he was driving along slowly with passengers when one of six USFK kids who were sitting on the roadside in a state of apparent drunkenness threw a liquor bottle of some sort at the vehicle, seriously damaging its windshield.
Police questioned three of the kids who were at the scene and are trying to locate the bottle-hurler, who reportedly ran away.
Times like this I wish Korea were a little bit more like Singapore.
Also on the “GIs Behaving Badly” front, OhMyNews reports that the “beer bottle crew” that sliced open a man’s face in a rather ugly incident in Uijeongbu earlier this month appeared for questioning on Friday. The three admitted that one of their number attacked the victim with a beer bottle, but are claiming that the Korean picked the fight by bumping into them. They are also claiming that with the exception of the man who actually wielded the bottle, the other two took no part in the assault. Whatever.
The victim held a 1-man protest in front of the police station, calling for the offending GIs to be detained and for USFK to immediately pay for his medical costs. According to OhMyNews, locals who commit such an act — a group, nighttime assault using a deadly weapon — could get at least five years in the pen, and what’s more, they’d be detained throughout the trial period unless the victim agreed to let them out.
Civic group heads and the victim himself planned to hold a meeting with 2nd Infantry Division officials and convey a letter of protest as the final part of a protest in Uijeongbu Saturday, but the U.S. side refused, explaining that the matter was still under investigation.
13 Comments
Marmot beat me to it. Let me move my observation over here…
I know that considering the number of US military personnel in Korea that the actual crime or misdemeanors are lower than the norm and I applaud the USFK for that. It is unfair to a certain extent, but the actions of the military personnel are vewied under microscopic scrutiny by the Korean public. Having that said, I hope the supervisor?€™s take their reponsiblity more seriously. If the superviors respond in a timely and earnest manner to such incidents (police requests) many of these will not reach the level of irritation it produces in the media.
USFK Family Members Hit the Korean News
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I was going to post some of my thoughts on USFK and the recent alcohol related incidents. My main argument was that bringing families to Korea might stem the tide of these unfortunate occurance…
“up to” is the key phrase in the sentence about the beer bottle and what would happen if he were a Korean citizen.
I wonder — is the USFK community starting to sour more than usual on Korea?
I would think those who were here for the 2002 fun fest have already rotated out.
Are the new guys rotating in more disallusioned with the SK-US relationship than in recent years?
Do the higher ups, say at the company level NCOs and officers, stay longer and some of them have been here for the past couple of years?
Has the middle rank officers, the ones on the ground, started to feel the influence of the big changes taking place and what appears to be the first steps to at least potentially disengaging USFK from Korea?
Are the soldiers on the ground starting to think that the major changes announced in USFK are just the first step?
If the US military rank and file is starting to turn some hypothetical point in thinking about the US-SK alliance…..
then we are in for a very interesting time.
It seems the move to send the bases south of the Han is reaching a crucial point — the buying of the land and prep for construction.
This gives the anti-US ngos the motivation and opportunity to do some widely publicized obstruction. It will generate publicity, good images and videos to upload, capture more attention than the usual demonstration, and it will cause frustrations as construction gets delayed and the Korean government starts hemming and hawing because they don’t particularly like the move off the DMZ or having to pay for it.
So, the Korean society is going to get ugly when we start pushing the movement plans through.
If the USFK rank in file is already feeling itself to be in a bad mood — ??? —
But, in general, I would guess there isn’t of a thing behind this string of incidents.
It is just assholes being assholes, as far as we know.
It is nothing shocking in any city of 25,000 residents much less those of 200,000 plus.
GI’s Kids are now causing problems
There was a while without any major inccidents. Now someone ran over an old lady with an LMTV, it was an accident and traggic as it may be these things happen. Then we had 3 soldiers beat a 35 year old Korean in the face with beer bottles, I think r…
These kids and their parents should be severely punished for this behavior. Like it or not, unfair as it is, all expats in Korea are held to a higher standard of conduct than Koreans.
If these brats had done this after the tank (ALVB) incident the locals would have lynched them.
“My main argument was that bringing families to Korea might stem the tide of these unfortunate occurance?€?”
Too late. I can only imagine how much hatred most USFK personnel have for the Koreans right now. Not that there was somekind of a love relationship before, but now we’re seeing the full manifests of decades of irreconcilable differences. I don’t think this is stoppable, and the petty clashes will only continue until another big one errupts that will irrecoverably damage the relationghip between the two countries.
I don’t think any of you should try to extrapolate a “big picture” from these individual incidents.
As the #3 post above implies, it could be that when similar incidents happen involving only Koreans it goes completely unremarked, and it’s just that the Korean media has chosen to play up this particular incident because it involved the children of USFK.
Commanders do not have UCMJ authority over dependents, thus a Singapore-style caning is impossible (however, I have no objection if ROK authorities want to administer one). Commanders do have considerable administrative authority; for example, it’s conceivable that this kid’s parents could be ordered to send him back to the US. This would be an administrative decision by the commanding general, not subject to appeal.
I doubt this will happen unless this particular particular dependent “has a record”.
I don’t remember any discussion here about the prevailing sentiments among the members of the Korean media (newspapers, TV) as regards USFK. Might be a good discussion for a post, Marmot.
If the vast majority are younger and share a general antipathy towards USFK, then selective decisions (and that of their editors) to play up every incident like this means that the reports will have a cumulative PR effect far beyond the actual seriousness of the individual incidents.
What will be will be, of course. I don’t agree with mass punishment or the imposition of drastic restrictions for USFK based on such individual incidents, especially if it’s based on a double standard that Koreans don’t enforce on themselves.
But, if these things are simply intolerable, then there is no law that says Koreans have to endure the unendurable; send the Americans home.
Huh….I was on a bus in Incheon about 3 years ago. Some kids threw a rock through one of the windshields. Luckily there were only a few people on the bus and no one was injured. The bus driver stopped at the side of the road to give chase. He didn’t chase them too far. These kids were faster than the 55 year old bus driver. And the people around on the street didn?€™t seem to care much either. He got back on the bus, said a few curse words, inspected the damage, asked if everyone was OK, and went back to driving in an even faster and more half hazard manor than before.
Interesting that incident never made the news.
That said, these USFK kids should be punished for recklessly putting other people in danger and for just being stupid.
Actucally, I think the Korean media, at least the English language versions, have been more quiet than usual. They didn’t make much note about the large riot at the base last week, and I haven’t seen the play up these crimes much — yet.
Often in the past, the press has used both these events to drum beat a rise in demonstrated anti-US feeling.
What is the Korean language media doing with it?
Any editorials about problemed GIs?
Are they running a handful of stories each week about each incident?
That is what the English language versions have done frequently in the past —- find new angles to cover the same story so they get to keep it in the public eye for a couple of weeks. Then if they can find another remotely similiar incident, they add and try to get a snowball effect going.
Of course, the GIs help out by doing some bad things and others giving in to being provoked.
Usually, I could tell what was in the Korean press by what my students came to class wanting to talk about, and usually I had an idea already because the English versions were echoing it.
What about right now?
The English press is fairly quiet on the events. what about the Korean versions? My wife is too busy to do the quick scanning for me and my Korean sucks too much to do it myself…
Well…….I just caught the Korea Times article on the incident. That is a classic example of the Korean media.
Military brats are little shits…always have been, always will be.
In front of the War Memorial… nice irony.
A few bottles at a few innocent civilians…a small price to pay for a free nuclear deterrent…the kids should be caned in public though.