Tag: U.S. Army

Nomad is right, this is different:

A South Korean soldier faces trial in a military court, accused of sexually assaulting a female U.S. soldier at Camp Casey on Dec. 19, 2nd Infantry Division and Ministry of National Defense officials confirmed this week.

The soldier’s first hearing in the South Korean military court is scheduled for Feb. 2 in Dongducheon but will be closed to the public, a defense ministry spokesman said.

The 6th Infantry Division soldier has been jailed since his arrest, the spokesman said.

I can guarantee you that if the soldier is found guilty the ROK Army will punish him much more severely than the light sentences handed out to South Korean civilians who have raped US soldiers in the past.  In my unit a few years back we had a senior KATUSA go to ROK Army jail for 2 months just for hazing a soldier.  Worst of all for him was that his time in jail did not count against his two year ROK Army commitment.  His hazing crime?  He would make new KATUSAs sing patriotic Korean songs in front of the unit. Finally one new KATUSA complained and the next thing we knew the senior KATUSA was in jail.  I can only imagine how long a sexual assault conviction would land a soldier in ROK Army jail, especially when you consider the ROK Army is really going to want to save face with their USFK allies.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out when you consider in 2003 a similar incident happened between a USFK a soldier sexually assaulting a KATUSA trainee at Camp Jackson:

A U.S. military court on Thursday sentenced an American soldier to 30 years in jail for sodomizing a South Korean soldier, the U.S. military said. Two other American soldiers suspected of involvement in the assault are under investigation.

Sgt. Leng Sok was court-martialed at Camp Casey in Dongducheon, north of Seoul, on charges of aggravated assault, indecent acts, sodomy, submission of a false official statement and conspiracy.

Sok “has been found guilty in all five charges,” said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a spokesman for the U.S. Eighth Army.

The victim’s family actually handed over jurisdiction of the case from Korean authorities, despite protests from anti-US groups, to the US military because of the light sentences given for sexual assaults in Korean courts.  The convicted sergeant in this case received 30 years in jail.  That’s sending a message and I expect the ROK Army will probably want to send a message as well.

Anyway as OFK points out the irony of this rape is quite evident when you consider all the righteous outrage from sectors of Korea over the US soldier who is alleged to have a raped a Korean woman a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t seen anything about this case in the Korean media yet compared to the instant headlines the US soldier made after his arrest two weeks ago. This is just the continuation of a trend of when crimes are committed against US soldiers little if any articles in the Korean media are written about it compared to instant headlines every time a US soldier commits any crime no matter how small against a Korean civilian.  The soldier doesn’t even have to commit a crime, it just has to appear he did to make headlines.  This is how the Myth of GI Crimes is cultivated in Korea.

UPDATE: I just saw a report on this on Anderson Cooper 360 today and of course they slanted and twisted the facts as well.  For one the suicide rate of 19.9 per 100,000 soldiers in Iraq, CNN said was higher than the average civilian suicide rate.  Yes it is higher than the average suicide rate, but it is not higher than average suicide rate of the civilains of the same age group and gender of those who committed suicide as General Kiley pointed out in the below Reuters article, but CNN conveniently left this information out of their Anderson Cooper piece.  They did make sure to harp on how they believe the suicide rate is going up due to increased deployments even though General Kiley in the below Reuters piece says the statistics don’t support it, especially when the average suicide rate of the last two years when combined is lower than the 2003 level, which of course CNN conveniently didn’t mention at all either.

______________________________________________________________________

The media is running big headlines like this recently, US Soldiers’ Suicide Rate in Iraq Doubles in 2005.  Sounds pretty grim right?  Well let’s look at the actual facts:

Twenty-two U.S. soldiers in Iraq took their own lives in 2005, a rate of 19.9 per 100,000 soldiers. In 2004, the rate was 10.5 per 100,000 and in 2003, the year of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the figure was 18.8 per 100,000.

The figures cover U.S. Army soldiers only. They do not include members of other U.S. military services in Iraq such as the Marine Corps.

Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army’s surgeon general, cautioned against overinterpreting the figures, saying suicide rates tended to fluctuate from year to year.

“We think that the numbers are so rare to begin with that it’s very hard to make any kind of interpretation,” he said at a news conference to present a study on the mental health of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

“We have not made a connection between the stress on the force and some massive or even significant increase in suicides,” he said.

While every suicide was one too many, Kiley said, the suicide rate among soldiers was lower than the average among civilians of the same age and gender.

So the truth comes out at the very end of the article.  Basically the minute number of soldiers who did commit suicide this year in the Army while stationed in Iraq is actually near identical to the 2003 number and if you take an average of the suicide rate from the last year than the overall number is actually much lower than the 2003 number.  Then the article concludes with the information that if your kid joins the military and goes to Iraq he/she is less likely to commit suicide compared to if he/she just stayed at home where the civilian percentage is higher.  Yet, the big headline is the rise in suicides in the military.

Why doesn’t the MSM come up with a fairer headline of, US Army Suicide Rate Rises, But Still Lower than Civilian Rate.  Aren’t these fairer headlines?  However, the MSM is not about fairness, it is about framing left/right issues and the military suicide rate is something they are trying to frame as soldiers committing suicide because of too many deployments because that is what the left wants you to believe even though the statistics do not support it.  I can guarantee you one thing, if the suicide rate goes down next year, you will hear nothing about it.  It is just like with recruiting numbers, as long as the military continues to make it’s recruiting numbers you will hear nothing about it, but if the military misses it’s recruiting mark for one month than it will be front page news.