Here was the last time U.S. troops were murdered by the North Koreans:
Troops of U.N. Command render salutes during a ceremony on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone on Aug. 18, 2021, marking 45 years since the killing of two U.S. officers at the site. (David Choi/Stars and Stripes)
Service members from the U.S. and South Korea on Wednesday afternoon paid tribute to two American soldiers who were axed to death by North Korean troops 45 years ago.
On Aug. 18, 1976, Capt. Arthur Bonifas, a Joint Security Force company commander, and 1st Lt. Mark Barrett, a platoon leader, were slain while trimming a tree at the Joint Security Area of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
You can read more about this incident from my prior posting that can be accessed below. Of interest in the Stars & Stripes article is that CPT Bonifas’ grandson is currently serving in Korea:
Bonifas’ legacy continues through his family. His daughter, who was 6 years old when he died, reached the rank of captain in the Army’s nursing program.
Bonifas’ grandson, Spc. Andrew Arthur Bonifas, joined the Army in 2019 and serves as petroleum supply specialist with the 1st Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment, out of Fort Riley, Kansas.
“I wanted to join the military to follow my grandfather’s and my mom’s footsteps,” Andrew Bonifas said to Stars and Stripes in a phone interview Wednesday.
Andrew, who is currently stationed in Camp Humphreys, South Korea, visited Camp Bonifas during the July 4th weekend.
I am utterly speechless by the corruption in mainstream America. Because my views are politically incorrect, the @nytimesbooks is refusing to recognize the North Korean stories. I thought that corruption was an exception, not the rule in this country @joerogan@jordanbpetersonpic.twitter.com/ZtF4BTC5ZZ
Vegan rally Lee Won-bok, chief of the Korea Vegan Union, stages a solo rally in Seoul on Aug. 13, 2021, to call for people to go vegan as part of efforts to improve their health, claiming sausage and ham have cancer-causing agents. (Yonhap)
South Korean army Capt. Yeon Ju Oh administers a Moderna coronavirus vaccine to a Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army soldier at Yongsan Garrison, South Korea, on Feb. 25, 2021. (Inkyeong Yun/U.S. Army)
South Korean troops conducting a joint, computer-simulated exercise with their American counterparts were all vaccinated and tested for COVID-19 before training began, a military official said Monday.
A South Korean Ministry of National Defense official speaking on the customary condition of anonymity told Stars and Stripes that due to service members being in close proximity with each other, “it was very important for all of them to get vaccinated.”
The two countries are conducting a combined command-post training Aug. 16 to 26. Rather than a large-scale field exercise involving thousands of combat troops, this exercise will primarily focus on computer simulations.
U.S. Forces Korea spokesman Col. Lee Peters, citing the command’s policy, did not comment on whether American forces participating in the joint training were all vaccinated.
However, Peters said USFK “can reassure you that we remain aligned with [the defense ministry] on aggressive COVID mitigation measures including conducting training with minimal essential personnel and in distributed locations.”
You can read more at the link, but the most interesting thing I read in the article was that 93% of the 550,000 ROK troops have received the vaccine though it is voluntary.
Only the hedgefunds are supposed to game the market, not the little people:
A group of retail investors here have dropped their plans to conduct a mass buying of a certain stock on the Seoul bourse, which was initially supposed to take place this month to protest against short-sellers, most of whom are foreign and institutional investors.
The Korea Stockholders Alliance (KSA) announced Sunday that the decision was made after taking into account the advice from its legal advisers and the predictable scenarios.
“Our campaign has been described as a form of speculation aiming for a short-term margin, and above all, short-sellers’ interruptions that rattled the market have created negative public sentiment toward us,” one of the alliance’s managers wrote on its website.
The group had tried to emulate U.S. social media platform Reddit’s WallStreetBets internet forum users, who sparked a short squeeze of the GameStop stock on the New York Stock Exchange in January through a mass-purchase of the American video game retailer’s stocks.
The campaign conducted by retail investors surprised global market insiders at that time, because an unexpected hike in the GameStop stock price caused large losses to several hedge funds that had bet on the price fall.
South Korea strongly protested the inclusion of a map indicating South Korea’s easternmost islets of Dokdo as Japanese territory in Tokyo’s newly created defense white paper for children, the foreign ministry said Monday.
Lee Sang-ryeol, the director-general for Asia Pacific affairs, and Kim Yong-gil, minister at the South Korean Embassy in Tokyo, lodged a protest to Naoki Kumagai, deputy chief of mission at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, and Taisuke Mibae, deputy director-general of the Japanese foreign ministry’s Asian and Oceanian affairs, respectively.
“They said that in light of our position that Dokdo is our inherent territory historically, geographically and by international law, (the map) can never be accepted, and they urged Japan to immediately delete the document,” the ministry said in a text message to reporters.
Indigenous sub launchedA launch ceremony for South Korea’s first 3,000-ton submarine, the Dosan Ahn Chang-ho, built by Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Co., is held at the South Korean shipbuilder’s Okpo shipyard on the southern island of Geoje on Aug. 13, 2021, in this photo release by the Navy. (Yonhap)
At least it appears that the most of the ROK embassy was able to get evacuated before the current chaos unfolded at the Kabul Airport:
Sunday’s rushed evacuation of the South Korean Embassy staff in Afghanistan proceeded smoothly with the help of friendly countries, including the United States, a foreign ministry official said Monday.
South Korea has temporarily closed its embassy in the war-torn country and evacuated most of its diplomatic staff to a third country in the Middle East amid the Taliban militant group’s faster-than-expected advances to retake full control of Afghanistan.
You can read more at the link, but the ROK Embassy still has three personnel and a civilian stuck at the Kabul Airport because of the chaos. Here is what is going on at the Kabul Airport right now:
Chaotic scenes unfolded at Kabul’s airport on Monday as thousands of people rushed the tarmac in desperate attempts to flee Afghanistan following a takeover by the Taliban, which swept into the capital in a stunningly swift overthrow of the Western-backed government.
Videos posted to social media from Hamid Karzai International Airport showed Afghans clinging to a departing U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane. Others showed people falling from the wheel well of a jet just before takeoff.
Other planes were seen overloaded with Afghans who flooded across the runway to board them.
You can read more at the link, but people are literally being killed grasping the sides of C-17 aircraft that are departing. What an avoidable disaster.
This photo, captured from the YouTube account of Harvard Law School, shows Professor J. Mark Ramseyer.
A Harvard professor has claimed that Japan did not force Korean and other women into sexual slavery during World War II, renewing his much-denounced claims that the victims were actually prostitutes.
J. Mark Ramseyer of the Harvard Law School made the claim in the preface to a recently published book on the victims, saying Japan’s military did not need to forcibly mobilize what he characterized as prostitutes and had little room to do so.
Authored by Tetsuo Arima, a social science professor at Waseda University, the book was published on July 30 ahead of South Korea’s Aug. 15 Liberation Day that marks the country’s liberation from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule, long a source of historical animosity between the neighboring countries.
In the Japanese-language preface, Ramseyer also said that it was only after Seiji Yoshida, a Japanese novelist, published a book entitled “My War Crimes” in 1983 that damage claims by former sex slaves started to emerge.
The book included Yoshida’s claim that he took Korean women from the island of Jeju for sexual service.
Ramseyer then claimed that women, who worked at the military brothels to make money or due to pressure exerted by their fathers, started to claim that they were forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese military.
You can read more at the link, but like I have long said, the comfort women controversy is one of these issues where facts do not matter, how people feel about the topic is what matters.
The Korean public likes to think that all the comfort women were girls sleeping in bed and kidnapped by evil Japanese soldiers while the Japanese rightists like to think they were all willing prostitutes. Both historical narratives are untrue if one really looks at the history.
What Professor Park writes about is the same historical narrative that Sarah Soh wrote about in her book “The Comfort Women“. In the book Soh provides documented evidence that most of the Korean women put into the comfort women system were sold by Korean brokers. The actual kidnapping of Korean women by Japanese soldiers would be a very rare occurrence when the broker system made so many of these women readily available. This does not absolve the Imperial Japanese from responsibility since they ran the comfort woman system that provided the demand for the Korean brokers to meet. To make even worse is that many of these girls were teenagers when sold into prostitution. I see no way that a young teenager should be considered a willing prostitute. Especially when many girls were sold by their families into prostitution for money due to the extreme poverty. This was actually a practice that was going on well into the US military era in South Korea.
It is pretty clear that the comfort women issue is not black and white, but ultimately the Imperial Japanese government was responsible for the actions of the Korean brokers that supplied the majority of the Korean girls that were underage. There is no need to create a false narrative of what happened to the comfort women when the truth is bad enough.
