U.S. Military Disposes of South Korean and Other Memorials at Bagram Airbase
It is amazing that it has been nearly a decade and half since ROK Army soldier, SGT Yoon Jang-ho was killed in Afghanistan. Well now the memorial to him and other Soldiers have been disposed of after the U.S. military shut down Bagram Airbase:
Much of the work done by several people during the final stretch was “sanitizing” Bagram.
“We pulled off stickers, signs went down,” said Kimberly Culverhouse-Steadman, who came to Bagram in February to close the USO and bring back its mementos. “They just didn’t want anything reminiscent of American presence.”
This effort was to “ensure consistency in appearance,” said Col. Jennifer Spahn, spokeswoman for U.S. Forces – Afghanistan, in a statement Friday.
Some objected to painting over the murals at Bagram, including James Von Holland, a contractor at Bagram who has photographed hundreds of murals during his time at U.S. bases in the Middle East.
“I didn’t like it at all,” Von Holland said. “It’s like going into the Louvre and destroying the Mona Lisa.”
Stars & Stripes
Here is SGT Yoon’s memorial afterwards:
It is tough to see these memorials being dismantled, but I think it had to be done. What would people think if the Taliban take the base over and we seem them defecating, blowing up, and doing other destructive things to these memorials.
By the way if you haven’t you should read up on SGT Yoon who has deep American ties and returned to Korea just to do his mandatory military service. He was the first Korean servicemember killed in action since the Vietnam War.
Guaranteed no Korean knows who he is.
Sic transit gloria mundi, eh?
But we know who he is.
And while we live we can share his story and mourn him and the probably-necessary-but-still-sad destruction of his monument, even if the average South Korean does not.
>Guaranteed no Korean knows who he is.
Guaranteed no American knows who he is either. So what’s your point again?
My point? It’s another reminder of miserable American military adventure failures. Twenty years of Afghan and Iraq wars – all that money, lives, morality, all for not. What else is new. I hear the Chinese and the Talibans will be cooperating to bring that region of the world under control while the US hightails out of there. This is why South Korea should never participate in military adventures with the US.
The actual expression is “all for naught”.