1967 was the first year that US troops were allowed to be tried in a Korean court under the newly signed US-ROK Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). Prior to the SOFA, US troops caught committing crimes in South Korea were tried in US military court martial. The first US servicemember tried in a Korean court was US Air Force Staff Sergent Billy Cox who was convicted in a taxi cab related incident. However, the first servicemember tried in the death of a Korean national was US Army Specialist John Vaughn.
Vaughn was a 20 year old Specialist from Douglasville, Georgia assigned to E Battery, 4th Missile Battalion, 44th Artillery outside of Kunsan where he served as a unit medic. Vaughn was accused of throwing a block of wood from the back of a moving vehicle and fatally killing 59 year old Dok-sin Yi who was a fish peddler riding a bicycle that the truck passed. What is especially interesting about this trial is not only is it the first trial of a US servicemember accused of killing a Korean national handled in a Korean court, but also the incident happened while on duty. What this means is that USFK voluntarily gave up jurisdiction for this case since any crime committed on duty is supposed to be handled by the US military. Considering how South Korea was in the midst of an attempted insurgency operation by North Korea at the time maybe the USFK leadership felt that even a case like this one that should have been tried by a court martial would be best to have in a Korean court to avoid any political repercussions?
Whatever the reasons, Vaughn found himself on trial in a Korean court and it may have actually worked out to his advantage. Vaughn claimed he accidentally dropped the wood from the truck that struck and killed Mr. Yi. The Korean Judge said that the prosecutors could not prove that Vaughn intentionally dropped the piece of wood from the truck that struck Mr. Yi. Due to this fact the judge convicted Vaughn of manslaughter and fined him 30,000 won which in 1967 was worth about $110. In addition to the $110 that Vaughn had to pay, USFK already paid the victim’s family $2,200 as well in compensation for the accident. Overall I would have to think that Specialist Vaughn must have felt pretty lucky to not have been convicted of more serious charges and only had to pay a $110 fine even if the death of Mr. Yi was an accident.
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Picture of USFK soldiers training at the guerilla warfare school from the April 11, 1968 Stars & Stripes. Does anyone think that maybe USFK should get back to its roots and reintroduce a guerilla warfare school in Korea?
Photograph of Colonel William S. Mullins from the 8th Army’s Surgeon Generals Office delivering toys and clothes to Korean orphans from the November 27, 1967 Stars and Stripes.
GI Flashbacks is a continuing series of articles here on the ROK Drop that chronicles important events and incidents involving US military servicemembers in Korea. Learn more about the servicemembers and events that have shaped the US-ROK alliance as we know it today at the below links:
DMZ Flashpoints is my ongoing series of articles chronicling the various incidents over the years that have occurred along the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). A popular saying is that there is no “D” in DMZ and these decades of deadly incidents long the DMZ is proof of that. Using newspaper archives I have been able to reconstruct the events of what happened in these incidents all those years ago. You can learn more about these incidents and the brave servicemembers who gave their lives in defense of South Korea at the below links:
One of the criticism often claimed by anti-USFK activists is that US soldiers commit crimes and not be tried in Korean courts. This is of course ridiculous, but it was a claim often made by Koreans especially during the 2002 anti-US movement period. This claim had no truth to it stretching all the way back to 1967. It was in 1967 that a US-ROK Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) was reached that allowed US troops to be tried in Korean courts. Before then crimes committed by US troops were handled by US military court martials. When the SOFA was agreed upon back in 1967 it was only a matter of time before someone became the first US servicemember tried in a Korean court. That person would end up being US Air Force Staff Sergeant Billy Cox:
Billy Cox was arrested for crimes that are amazingly similar to stupid crimes committed by US servicemembers to this day. SSgt Cox on the night of February 20, 1967 was accused of setting fire to the home of his Korean girlfriend named Kyung-soon Eum who lived in Osan. He was alleged to have set the fire because he found out Eum had been cheating on him with another man. After setting the fire he was then accused of assaulting a cab driver. Considering all the incidents with cab drivers in recent years, it is only fitting that the first servicemember case handled by Koreans courts was a taxi cab related incident. Here is how the March 10, 1967 Stars & Stripes described the incident:
As the case went to trial the Korean prosecutors asked the Seoul court to sentence SSgt Cox to three years in a Korean jail. Here is how the June 7, 1967 Stars & Stripes described the trial:
The trial ended with SSgt Cox being acquitted on the arson charge, but convicted of assaulting the cab driver. He was given a 50,000 won fine by the court which was about $185 back in 1967. So if there was ever a trivia question asking what crime the first US servicemember tried in a Korean court was convicted of, it would be for assaulting a cab driver all the way back in 1967. Good luck though getting an anti-US activist in Korea to ever believe it.
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I feel bad for the guy that died trying to stop one of these suicides from happening, but I do think there was probably more going on with these two that killed themselves considering the corruption probe that is happening:
Failure to meet deadlines and pay contractors on time may have contributed to the deaths this past spring of three South Koreans working on the U.S. Army’s massive expansion of Camp Humphreys, according to local police.
Two South Korean workers committed suicide in separate incidents in May, while a third man died from injuries after trying to intervene in one of the deaths.
The head of a subcontracting company set himself on fire May 8 at a Humphreys work site and died at a hospital 10 days later. The man, surnamed Han, claimed to be nearly $1.8 million in debt, police said. Media reports said that Han may not have been paid by the contracting company that hired his firm and may have been unable to pay his company’s taxes.
Another man who tried to save, Han died May 22, police said.
The third man, an employee of Samsung C&T Corp. surnamed Kim, hanged himself May 7 in an off-post dormitory for Samsung employees, a Pyeongtaek police official said.
Kim had been overseeing the base hospital’s construction but failed to meet building deadlines and was demoted to head of construction for the dental clinic, the officer said. Kim killed himself because he was upset over the demotion, police said.
Suicide in South Korea is the fourth-leading cause of death overall, after cancer, stroke and heart disease, according to the World Health Organization. [Stars & Stripes]
Considering how much of the Army soldiers in USFK are now rotational it is not surprising there were not force cuts in USFK:
America’s commitment to the Pacific pivot and unease about a more assertive Russia appear to be driving the Army’s decision not to reduce troop numbers in Japan, South Korea and Europe.
The Army plans to cut 40,000 soldiers and 17,000 civilian jobs over two years, but details released Thursday show the plan affects only the Pacific on the western side, with U.S. Army Pacific saying Hawaii and Alaska will lose 3,800 soldiers. None of the cuts will affect units in Europe.
Officials have yet to determine which Army civilian personnel will lose their jobs, and they warned that there will likely be further troop reductions if Congress and the White House can’t avert another round of defense budget cuts. Those opposed to the cuts question their wisdom amid a number of troubling developments: Cold War-style tension with Russia, Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, and the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East.
If there are further cuts, the Army — which will shrink from 490,000 to 450,000 active-duty soldiers — will be “incapable of meeting current deployment requirements and responding to overseas contingency requirements,” U.S. Army Pacific said in a statement. [Stars & Stripes]
Having spent time serving in the Iron Brigade it is a bit sad to see it deactivate:
A woman pauses to watch personnel carriers and tanks from the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment and 1st Battalion, 72nd Armored Regiment that were participating in an exercise on Korea’s western front on Dec. 23, 1966. On July 2, 2015, units belonging to the 2nd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team will inactivate, marking the end of more than 50 years on the peninsula.
A unit that has guarded the Korean peninsula’s tense border for five decades has been inactivated and replaced with the Army’s first rotational brigade combat team deployed to the area.
The 2nd Infantry Division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team — known as the “Iron Brigade” — was inactivated Thursday morning during a ceremony at Camp Casey. Assuming its responsibilities is the Fort Hood-based 1st Calvary Division’s 2nd “Black Jack” Brigade Combat Team, which is in Area 1 on a nine-month deployment.
Military officials have touted the move to rotational deployments of units stationed along the Demilitarized Zone as a way to maintain cohesion in a theater where constant turnover is the norm. Troops are typically stationed in South Korea on one- or two-year tours. But under the rotational deployment plan, entire units will train for and deploy to the peninsula together.
“I can tell you that when this transfer of authority takes place, our amount of readiness goes up,” said Gen. Theodore Martin, 2ID commander. Having intact rotational units deploy to the division also means he won’t see a turnover of about 10 percent of his forces each month, he said. [Stars & Stripes]
Between 1966-1970 what became known as the “DMZ War” raged which saw soldiers stationed on the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in regular contact with North Korean infiltrators probing US military defenses as well as trying to enter the country in order to establish a communist insurgency in the South. However sometimes the infiltration by the North Koreans was for the single minded purpose of killing Americans and that is exactly what happened on May 22, 1967 at an isolated American installation on the DMZ known as Camp Walley. Camp Walley was an extremely small camp located adjacent to the north side of the Imjim River and short distance from the DMZ. The camp housed one company of infantrymen from A/1-23 Infantry Regiment. The camp was basically just a small collection of quonset huts to house the men in between their guard shifts and patrol duty along the DMZ. Here is an image of what the small camp looked like:
At dusk on May 21, 1967 a North Korean sapper unit infiltrated through the American patrolled area of the DMZ. The sapper team was carrying explosives that were intended to be used for the express purpose of bombing an American barracks. Prior infiltrations with the purpose of killing American soldiers had centered around small arms ambushes near the DMZ. This attack was going to be different and intended to send a message to the Americans that not even in their barracks away from the frontlines were they safe. The North Korean sappers infiltrated 6 kilometers behind the American lines before coming upon Camp Walley. The North Koreans were so skilled at infiltration that they were actually able to creep around the camp and look into the different buildings and determine which ones had the most people in it before blowing them up. Unfortunately for the men of 1st Platoon, A Company, 1-23 Infantry Regiment, their barracks were chosen by the North Koreans to be the one that was blown up. The saboteurs set their explosives on two different barracks and fled. At dawn the explosives went off destroying the two buildings. Here is how the May 24, 1967 edition of the Stars & Stripes reported the bombing:
This image of the barracks bombing was provided courtesy of Jim Skiff who was a lieutenant assigned to the unit:
The blast from the bombing shook the entire camp and immediately alerted everyone that the base was under attack. Some of the Alpha company’s men began to sift through the rubble to find survivors while the Company Commander Captain Duncan personally led the sweep into the surrounding countryside to find the infiltrators. Unfortunately the search team came up empty and were not able to find them; they had long since fled the scene. The bombing killed two soldiers and wounded 17 others. The soldiers killed were SP4 Carl R. Mueller from Texas and PVT Baron J. Smith from Washington State who were killed in their beds while sleeping. However, looking at the damage it is amazing that only two soldiers were killed in the bombing.
The North Korean sappers that conducted the operation were quite skilled according to Major Roger Donlon who was the first US Medal of Honor recipient in the Vietnam War who happened to be stationed on the DMZ at the time::
Maj. Roger Donlon, the first Medal of Honor recipient in the Vietnam war, poses outside his headquarters tent at the Advanced Combat Training Academy. With him is the camp’s mascot, “Lieutenant.”
WITH THE U.S. 2ND INF. DIV., Korea TV Maj. Roger Donlon looked with both bitterness and admiration at the mangled and blasted remains of what had been two large barracks.
It had been a fast, neat job of sabotage and killing this Donlon had to admit. The North Korean commando team came in after dusk and went out before dawn, May 22, 1967. They had done their work with lethal efficiency and two American soldiers were dead in a heap of shattered rubble.
“At first,” said Donlon, “you admire a professional job. Then it makes you mad.”
The death and sabotage was one of the first sights to greet Donlon when he came into the U.S. 2nd Inf. Div. in May, a major for only two months.
You could spot him as a soldier anywhere. The close-cropped blond hair, the steady blue eyes, the set and determined features, the erect posture it’s all there, to mark Donlon’s profession and trade.
But when Donlon came to Korea, he did not wear two distinctive marks of the career he chose several years ago. He left his green beret back in Vietnam when he left in 1964 as a severely-wounded casualty. And the blue, white-starred ribbon that marks him as a Medal of Honor winner is not worn on his plain, no-frills uniform. An all-business soldier, Donlon only wears his Combat Infantryman Badge.
Donlon, the first soldier to win America’s highest award in the Vietnam War, is now in Korea. But the infiltration, terrorism and sudden death Donlon knew in another land are still part of his life. As a Special Forces man, he appraised the bombing with a coldly professional eye. As an American and a soldier, he felt grief and anger.
Where once the enemy was a stealthy little man named Charlie, who wore black pajamas and fought from waist-deep paddy slime, now Donlon must deal with an expertly silent intruder named Joe. Joe breaches barbed wire and creeps over dead, winter-browned farmland to blast sleeping men and attack frontline guard posts along the 18-mile sector of the Demilitarized Zone manned by Americans.
Joe deserves a very respectful kind of enmity and Donlon knows it. But Donlon feels that Joe has a long way to go before he can match the Vietnamese farmer who turns into a death-dealing guerrilla at dusk.
“They (the North Koreans) are well trained, and no doubt they’re very professional. But they’re not as good as the Viet Cong not yet. If you look at that one incident, yes, they did a job. They’re just not as tough and smart as Charlie, though. And there’s not as many of them, thank God.” [Stars & Stripes]
The fact that the North Korean sappers received recognition from someone of Major Donlon’s stature gives a good indication of how skilled the North Korean infiltrators were at the time, especially to pull off something like this so far from the DMZ. The below tactical map shows how Camp Walley was located 6 kilometers away from the DMZ:
Really when you think about it, the fact that the North Korean infiltrators were able to cross mine fields, get through fencing, and evade hundreds of soldiers on patrol is really quite remarkable. The Google Earth image below gives an even better idea of the conditions and the type of terrain the saboteurs had to cross in order to accomplish their mission:
As Major Donlon indicated, you have to respect the enemy’s capabilities, but you can hate them for doing what they did. The bombing ended up not having the effect the North Koreans had intended. Instead of increasing fear in US troops it actually motivated them because of the cowardice of the attack. The bombing just made the soldiers serving on the DMZ more motivated to confront the North Korean threat and increased their vigilance while patrolling the DMZ. It was quite clear now that stopping infiltrations could literally mean the difference between life and death for the soldiers off duty in the rear.
Another unanticipated result of the barracks bombing was that units stationed even further in the rear then Camp Walley were ordered to conduct regular patrolling outside the camps. Units stationed at US military installations in Dongducheon and in Uijongbu were ordered to conduct regular patrols around their installations in search of North Korean infiltrators. These increased patrols created more difficulty for North Korean infiltrators to move around the countryside undetected as well as creating difficulty for spies to gather intelligence around American military installations. Instead of creating fear, the bombing simply strengthened the resolve of American units to confront the North Korean threat.
After the bombing the USFK Commander General Charles Bonesteel recognized the survivors of the attack with Purple Hearts. Here is how the May 30, 1967 edition of the Stars & Stripes reported this event:
Here is a list of the 17 soldiers presented Purple Hearts by General Bonesteel:
SSG Jose Ruiz-Rodriguez
SPC Erskine Clifford
PFC Billy Lee
PFC Arvie Cothren
PFC Clifford Butler
PFC Michael Key
PFC Raul Gallardo
PVT Danny Howarth
PVT Curtis Flewellen
PVT William Butzin
PVT Thomas Lawrence
PFC Stanley Isaac
PFC Joseph Kinchen
SSG Thomas Anderson
SPC Nathaniel Conley
PFC Thomas Rush
PVT Gerald Conley
As far as Camp Walley today, next to nothing remains of the installation:
In the above picture you can make out the remains of what could have been buildings on the side of the hill. Camp Walley and the bombing that happened there is largely forgotten by everyone except for the people that served there. The Korean War may have been known as the “Forgotten War”, but the “DMZ War” should been known as the “Really Forgotten War” since so few people know about this period in US military history. Fortunately the 2nd Infantry Division is beginning to embrace this part of the unit’s history and remembering the soldiers who served during the DMZ War. Maybe there should be a memorial of some kind to honor the victims of this cowardly bombing attack as well?
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