Category Archives: military

by | 2 September 2004 · 5:47 pm

Good Soldier Outlier: Coping with the Draft

I started college, without much enthusiasm, in the fall of 1967 at the University of Richmond, Virginia. I dropped out in the middle of my sophomore year, in delayed culture shock after having spent most of my childhood in Japan. My academic advisor had talked me into taking ROTC the first year, but I dropped it in order to take a journalism class during my sophomore year. Journalism and German were the only two classes I had any interest in that semester. My German professor called me to ask why I didn’t bother to show up for the exam. (The only exam I showed up for was a required religion class, “The Bible as History,” which I had prepared for half my life, not just half a year.)

Something similar happened to three out of four childhood friends of mine from the Southern Baptist missionary community in Japan. All of us who dropped out ended up in the military, one in the Navy and two in the Army. In Virginia, at least, conscientious objector status was only granted to those who belonged to established religions that espoused pacifism. You couldn’t personally pick and choose which–if any–wars you cared to fight in.

Family History

My father was raised a Quaker, but became a Baptist, and spent World War II on a ministerial deferment at the University of Richmond, graduating in 1945. Four of his five brothers–likewise Quaker-raised and Baptist-converted–served in the military, the youngest in the Navy during the Korean War. (He visited us in Japan.) None was an officer, none died, and none really talked about what he’d been through.

The same goes for my mother’s two brothers, raised Presbyterian in the Shenandoah Valley, who enlisted for World War II. One spent his time in B-17s out of Thule, Greenland, protecting convoys in the Atlantic. His plane went down near Bermuda in 1945, losing half the crew, but he managed to survive after several weeks in hospital. The other served in Co. A, 314th Infantry, 79th (Cross of Lorraine) Division through Normandy and the Vosges, then across the Rhine, and finally into Czechoslovakia. He was a very taciturn man, and never talked about the war, not even to his wife, until he attended a D-Day anniversary in Normandy in 1994, when he broke down and wept.

The tradition goes back even further. Two great grandfathers fought in the Civil War, on the wrong side. I’m very glad their side lost–and I’m even gladder that they both survived. In each case their last battles were against Gen. Custer. One, a private in the 45th Virginia Infantry, was taken prisoner after Custer’s flank attack at Waynesboro in February 1865, the last battle of Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign. The one in the 11th Virginia Infantry was WIA in April 1865 at Five Forks, where Custer helped turn Lee’s flank and drive him out of Petersburg. I’d love to know how each of them reacted when they heard about Custer’s death at Little Big Horn in 1876.

Personal History

Among the three of us baby-boomer agemates from Japan who enlisted, only one ever saw combat–the one who joined the Navy, oddly enough. Enlisting in the Navy was one way to minimize direct exposure to hostile fire, although it required four years on active duty, rather than the two-year minimum required by the draft. Unfortunately, the Navy man ended up guarding ammo depots in Cambodia in 1969-70, where he suffered lifelong disabilities after leaping out of a guard tower during a firefight and shattering his ribs and spine. Vietnam has defined the rest of his life.

The two of us who ended up in the Army enlisted specifically for a noncombat military occupational specialty (MOS). The other friend became a radio technician and spent most of his enlistment at Ft. McPherson, Georgia, where he helped record the Calley trial. He went on to become an award-winning TV producer and pioneer in High Definition TV.

After taking a battery of aptitude tests, I enlisted in April 1969 with a contract for language school because there weren’t any openings in journalism. (Army reporter Al Gore enlisted in August 1969.) Of the 8 languages on my list, the Army in its wisdom picked number 7, Romanian. Kurdish was number 8, but that probably required Special Forces or CIA status. I chose languages that would keep me in school for 9-12 months of my 3-year enlistment. I started with Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Russian–but avoided Vietnamese and Southeast Asian languages.

Language school helped turn me toward linguistics and away from journalism. Thanks to the GI Bill, work study, grad assistantships, and a variety of part-time and full-time jobs, I was able to finish a doctorate with only $2,000 in student loans, which I paid off early. On balance, I’d have to say the Army did more for me than I did for it.

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by | 2 September 2004 · 6:37 am

Good Soldier Outlier: Introduction

So many people these days seem to be fighting the Vietnam War all over again, and so few politicians, journalists, and pundits–and fewer and fewer academics–have any military experience at all. So I thought I’d seize the opportunity to share a few of my own impressions about what it was like to be in the Vietnam Era military. There are far more Vietnam Era Vets than there are Vietnam Vets. I’m one of the former. I never got close to combat. Never even left the States. True war heroes may be reluctant to talk about their experiences, but a bookish clerical soldier like me should be able to prattle on and on.

If you get nothing else out of it, I hope at least you come away with a feeling that people in the military are just people, in all their diversity, and not some strange subspecies of robotic sociopaths, as so many antiwar protestors seem to assume.

The thing that most disturbs me about so many of my politically active colleagues in academia is their visceral revulsion at all things military, and their tendency to demonize anyone connected with the military. It’s even worse than the casual bigotry one finds on American campuses toward anyone with a marked Southern accent, or anyone who openly professes Christianity.

Maybe I’m overly sensitive. I was raised among expatriate Southerners in Japan, but consciously worked to erase any traces of a Southern accent, while teasing friends who kept theirs. Now my daughter teases me for the traces her finely tuned ear picks up, while I get defensive about the South. I was also raised among Christian missionaries, although I abandoned the faith during adolescence. By now I’ve also abandoned my old resentment toward the church.

My lofty rationale for indulging a story-telling whim, then, is to help counter one kind of antimilitary bigotry that seems so widespread among those inclined toward pacifism. Perhaps I might also help counter a bit of the promilitary mythologizing that seems so widespread among hawks.

The first installment will follow this evening.

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by | 10 June 2004 · 8:05 pm

Cambodians Profiled in Rocky Mountain News

The Rocky Mountain News is running a 12-part series called The Healing Fields about a Cambodian family in Denver who are trying to help Cambodians back home. Here’s the editor’s introduction. It seems a good example of making the global local, or vice versa.

As you know, the Rocky Mountain News is a local newspaper. The motto we use on our advertisements is “Closer to home,” because we feel it expresses the core of our identity, that we cut closer to your lives and that our emphasis is what happens here, where you – and we – live.

So when Assistant Business Editor Jane Hoback approached me late in the summer of 2003, I have to admit I was somewhat dubious of the value of making a major commitment to Randa and Setan’s story. Many people from this area, after all, help others around the world, as Randa and Setan do.

But then I met them.

As Jane says, “they’re not saints,” but in a visit to my office they struck me as remarkable souls whose story could change the lives of others.

I was struck right away by how their Christian faith would play such an important role in any story we did. We in the secular press are often criticized, even rejected, for our perceived denial of the importance of religious beliefs. I believe in the value of taking seriously what motivates people, why they act and think the way they do. I believe if we can bring understanding, we have done our job well.

And so we began our journey. Jane rarely writes stories for the Rocky. She normally helps polish the work of others. But this story gripped her, and she was determined to tell it herself.

One of our challenges was that so much of this story is history. It is the retelling by Randa and Setan of their ordeal and escape from Cambodia. They were alone. This is what they remember, and the memories are painful. As Jane listened, and we learned more, the more it seemed worth traveling to their homeland, where we could witness Randa and Setan’s program to free women who had been sold or forced into prostitution and give them the chance for a new life.

Jane was joined on that journey by Ellen Jaskol, a talented photographer whose work often graces our Spotlight section.

I had come to see that although we needed to travel halfway around the world to tell it, this was a local story. Not just because Randa, Setan and their extended family live among us, but because it is just such stories that show us how connected we are to a world that is growing smaller and smaller.

This is especially the case in an open Western city such as Denver, where so many of us come from somewhere else.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to cross the cultural barriers in a strange land. But try we must. Jane and Ellen traveled for two weeks with a driver and a translator, following Setan through his past and observing his struggle in the present.

When they returned, the question we faced was how to tell such a sweeping story. The way we approach big projects at the Rocky is to form a team that works together from the start. Nothing is more satisfying than working with a group of people who complement each other’s strengths.

And that’s what happened in this case.

The story starts thus:

At first, 18-year-old Setan Lee didn’t notice the trucks full of armed soldiers rumbling into the Buddhist temple square in his hometown of Battambang.

On this final day of the Cambodian New Year, music and noisy celebration filled the packed square in Cambodia’s second largest city. Children played in the warm afternoon air. Revelers sprinkled perfumed water onto the temple statues in a blessing ritual intended to bring good luck, long life and happiness.

“We were celebrating,” Setan says. “We were having fun.”

Setan didn’t understand when he saw the grim, black-uniformed soldiers pouring out of the trucks, aiming their rifles wildly and shouting “enemy” over and over.

Setan’s best friend didn’t understand, either. He approached one of the soldiers.

I’m not your enemy, he told the soldier. Why do you call me your enemy?

The soldier’s response was swift and irrevocable.

“Just like that, they shot him and killed him.”

Setan froze in disbelief and terror. He went numb.

“Right away, I know he’s not going to make it. He’s already dead.”

It was April 17, 1975, and in one terrifying moment, Setan Lee – son of a wealthy businessman, youngest student in his medical school class – lost a world of promise and possibility.

via Santepheap – The Cambodia Weblog

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by | 20 May 2004 · 7:25 pm

The New Guinea Schoolboy and the Japanese Officer

The following story was told to me in 1976 by a man from Morobe Province, New Guinea who was a noted traveler and raconteur whose nickname was “Samarai,” because he had once spent time there. (My late West Virginia uncle had also spent time as an Army cook on nearby Goodenough Island after spending time in Australia. He had a lot of respect for the Aussies, and he’d been in fistfights with more than a few of them.)

In this first, rough translation, I’ve tried to capture the storyteller’s idiom without presuming too much specialized knowledge on the part of my readers. We can be sure the story has “improved” over countless retellings, but it nevertheless conveys a third-party perspective on the Pacific War that is too rarely heard. For more local reactions to the Pacific War, consult the Australian-Japan Research Project for Australia and PNG, and the book Typhoon of War for Micronesia.

While were were in school [around March 1942], the Japanese came and took over Lae, took over the Bukaua coast [the south coast of the Huon Peninsula], all the way to Finschhafen. But we stayed there at school for another year. Then, okay, the Australians and Americans seemed to be planning to come back. Their number one patrol officer, Taylor, sent a letter saying, “Natives, don’t stay in your villages any more. Build huts in your hillside gardens and stay there. A big fight is coming.”

So here’s what we did. We people at Hopoi abandoned Hopoi. We took our school, our desks, and everything and set them up in the forest. We stayed at a place called “Apo.” We kept going to school and, okay, the Australians came from over on the Moresby side, they came all the way to Wau. And they came down that little trail and they and the Japanese fought each other over at Mubo and Komiatam [above Salamaua].

And they sent word to us Kembula [Paiawa], Numbami [Siboma], and Ya [Kela] villagers to go carry their cargo to Komiatam. And they did that and the fighting got harder. The Australian forces got bigger. And some Numbami went and carried cargo over at Salamaua. They went at night. They went there and the Australians came down and fired on the Japanese so the Numbami ran into the forest.

They ran into the forest and there was one guy named G. “G, where are you? We’re leaving!”

So, okay, they went and slept overnight and the next morning arrived at Buansing. And a Japanese bigman there named Nokomura [probably Nakamura], he heard the story so he came down and talked to me. He talked to me and I said, “Oh, that was my cousin, my real [cross-]cousin.”

So the Japanese guy said, “Really? Your cousin? Oh, your cousin has died. The Australians shot him dead.” And he spoke Japanese, and he said, “One man, bumbumbumbumbumbu, boi i dai.”

I said, “Oh, you’re talking bad talk.”

Then he said, “Tomorrow, you go to school until 12 o’clock, then come to me.” So I went to school until 12 o’clock and I went to him.

He gave me, dakine, a rifle, a gun. And he gave me, dakine, ten cartridges, ten rounds. Then he said, “I’d like for you to take this and go shoot a few birds and bring them back for me to eat.”

So, okay, I took it and I went. And he wrote out my pass. And there were bigmen with long swords the Japanese called “kempesi” [probably kempeitai, the dreaded military police]. One man, his name was Masuda [possibly Matsuda]. This man had gone to school over in Germany. And he really knew German well.

So I came by and he saw me, “You, where are you going with that gun?”

So I said, “Oh, a bigman gave it to me to shoot birds for him to eat.”

“Let me see your papers.”

So I showed him my papers and he said, “Okay, go.”

So I went and found a friend of mine. His name was Tudi. I said, “Hey, Tudi. A bigman gave me a gun and I haven’t shot a bird yet. Could we both go and you shoot?”

“Okay.”

So we both went and stopped at an onzali tree and two hornbills were there. So he went and planted his knee and shot one and it fell down. So I was really happy and ran and got it. We kept going until he shot a cockatoo.

So after I thanked him, I said, “Give me the gun and I’ll see if I can shoot.”

So he gave it to me and we kept going until we saw some wala birds, and I said, “I’ll try to shoot. Shall I shoot or not?”

So, okay, I fired and I shot a wala bird to add to the others. So I said, “Okay, we have enough, so I’ll take it and go.”

So I tied the wings together and hung them over the gun and carried them back over to Buansing. I went and all the Japanese bigmen were sitting in a, dakine, committee. They were talking about the coming battles. They were sitting there talking and their bigman said, “Look, here comes my man,” and the guards saluted him. And I was invited in.

So I entered the building and the guard at the door said, “Ha!” When he said that I replied, “Ha!” And I bowed three times and he bowed three times.

After we finished, okay, I went up to the second guard and he went, “Ha!” And I said “Ha!” And I bowed three times and he bowed three times. Okay, then I walked on.

So then I went up to the man who stood at the steps up to the bigman. When he said, “Ha!” then I said, “Ha!” and we had both bowed the third time, I went up the steps.

I went up the ladder and the people who were sitting in the meeting, they stood up and went “Ha!” to me and I said “Ha!”, then I went up and they gave me a chair. I sat down.

And the bigman glanced at his cook. And, okay, he took smokes and opened a pack and passed them around until they were gone. Okay, then he struck his lighter and gave everyone a light, then we all sat down. We sat and sat, maybe a half-hour. Then he told his people, “Okay, the talk is over.”

So they all split up and went out leaving just him and me still sitting. We stayed sitting until he said, “I’ve already given you a blanket and a mosquito net. Here’s a knife. Here’s your lavalava. Over there are your bags of rice and dried bonito, two tins of meat, a tin of fish.”

I said, “Oh, you’ve given me so much. How will I carry it?”

He said, “Oh, it’s all right. Take it away.”

So I asked him, “You’ve given away so much. What does it mean?”

“Oh, there’s a reason. I guess I’ll tell you. After you leave, a ship will come tonight, a submarine will come and I’ll board it and go to Rabaul.”

I said, “Why are you going to do that?”

“Nothing. All us bigmen are going up to Rabaul because the bigmen and a whole lot of soldiers are at Rabaul. And these people, their job is to stay behind, and fight the Australians and Americans when they come, and destroy them, destroy them here. And us bigmen will be in Rabaul.”

“Oh, all right.”

Then he told me, he said, “You go get a good night’s sleep so that when you see the crack of dawn you’ll get up quickly.”

So I listened to him and left.

For a very well-researched Japanese account of the defense of Lae-Salamaua, see here.

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by | 22 March 2004 · 7:03 am

U.S. Marines Rely on Translation Devices

Gregg K. Kakesako reports in Sunday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

Breaking the language barrier: Two tools help Marines communicate instantly in dozens of languages

The Marines have two types of universal voice translator devices to communicate with Iraqis about anything from searching vehicles to giving medical aid.

Shujie Chang, director of experimental projects at Marine Forces Pacific, said the devices are meant to help Marines who are now being sent to all corners of the world.

“You can take these devices,” Chang said, “into any country and they are a means to communicate with the local population.”

However, both voice translation devices are only one-way, where the commands or questions are made in English and then translated. Both rely on a pre-programmed lists of phrases.

The Phraselator P2 is the size of hefty personnel digital assistant, with a three-by-four-inch LCD display screen. It is manufactured by VoxTec, a subsidiary of Marine Acoustics Inc. in Newport, R.I.

The Voice Response Translator was developed 10 years ago for law enforcement officials and is basically a portable computer that attaches to a police officer’s belt. It was designed, said Timothy McCune, president of Integrated Wave Technologies, to keep the hands of the police officer free.

Aaargh. Better than nothing, I suppose. But not by much.

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by | 20 February 2004 · 7:56 pm

Former Soviets Left Behind in Afghanistan

The Argus links to a poignant story on IWPR about Soviet soldiers who remained behind in Afghanistan.

On February 15, 1989, General Boris Gromov was officially the last Soviet soldier to stand on Afghan soil before he crossed the Termez bridge into the USSR, drawing a close to the long and brutal campaign that Russian politicians were later to call “a tragic mistake”.

But Gennady, and more like him, were still there. As Russians, Ukrainians and the rest began shutting off from the Afghan war as a nightmare best forgotten, those who were left behind faded from memory, too.

Many would find it hard to go back – some were deserters, while others converted to Islam after being captured and held by the mujahedin. In the interim, the Soviet Union they had known collapsed into 15 different countries.

A few achieved some fame – notably the two Russian citizens known as Mohammadi and Islamuddin who served as bodyguards to the famous commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. As late as 1996, they were rumoured to be at the front line, fighting with Massoud’s Northern Alliance against the Taleban.

Since then the two men are said to have left Afghanistan, going back home to Russia. But others remain.

During a recent trip to Kunduz, a taxi driver tipped me off about someone called Ahmad, a former Soviet soldier now living as an Afghan.

This was far more than a rumour – I was given the address of the building where he rents a small room with his family.

Only half an hour later, I was sitting in a local store talking to a man in the typical flat “pakol” hat, with all the mannerisms and dialects of a native Afghan – but still looking like a Russian.

He looked so intimidating that I didn’t dare speak to him in Russian, switching over only after an initial conversation in Dari.

When I asked him what name his parents had given him, his face remained immobile as he whispered an Islamic invocation.

But after a long conversation in the dark, mud-walled room, Ahmad relaxed, and gradually revealed some of the characteristics of the young man he had once been – Private Alexander Levenets. The incongruousness of the situation was accentuated by the music he put on – Alexander Rosenbaum’s Soviet-era ballads of army life.

The 19-year-old Alexander, from the Ukrainian village of Melovadka, joined the Soviet army in April 1983. He thought his troubles were over, that he had a ticket out of a hard life of providing for his blind widowed mother and an elder brother with diabetes.

At first army life was good, as his unit was transferred around the USSR and eventually deployed at an airbase in Kunduz.

But things took a turn for the worse as – like many Soviet conscripts – he was subjected to beatings and other forms of humiliation by other, more senior soldiers in his unit. Eventually he could bear it no longer, and deserted.

One cold October night in 1984, Alexander fled into the night. His life was saved by a kindly old Afghan, who took pity on him and allowed him to hide at his house.

The man introduced the deserter to some mujahedin, who fortunately for him belonged to one of the more moderate factions. They listened sympathetically to his story, and treated him with a respect he had not had from his countrymen.

“I stayed in the group,” he said. “And after a month, I accepted Islam.”

So Alexander became Ahmad, serving under guerrilla commander Omir Ghulam – but not expected to take up arms against the army he had once served in. The Afghans’ acceptance of him grew into respect as he became a more observant Muslim than most of them.

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by | 23 January 2004 · 11:08 am

South Korea and the Vietnam-era Mindset

A Vietnam-era mindset still influences many Americans, perhaps especially longtime leftists. The same is true in South Korea. But the Vietnam era meant rather different things to South Koreans than it did to Americans.

For one thing, many South Koreans mapped their images of a divided Vietnam onto a divided Korea, and vice versa. This shows up very starkly in a novel like The Shadow of Arms, by Hwang Suk-Young, whose English translation by Chun Kyung-Ja was published by the Cornell University East Asia Program in 1994. I had the chance to write a review of the book for the journal Korean Studies in 1996.

At one point during a huge antiwar rally in San Francisco that I attended while on a weekend pass from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey in 1969, a speaker standing beneath the flag of North Vietnam began attaching conditions to his hitherto well-received calls for peace. But almost as soon as his “We demand peace” turned to “We will accept no peace until …” the more-alert members of the crowd began to chant “Peace now! Peace now!” More and more people took up the cry until they drowned out the rest of the speech. For the speaker, peace was a step on the road to partisan victory. For the crowd, it was an end in itself. The crowd won that round but, in typical fashion, the partisan peaceniks were better represented among the organizers, while the naive peaceniks were far more numerous among the organized.

Although utterly cynical about the enterprise (and especially the entrepreneurs) of war, The Shadow of Arms is not exactly an antiwar novel. It is written more in the spirit of that partisan peace activist beneath the North Vietnamese flag in San Francisco. Set almost entirely amidst the logistics-and-supply cornucopia behind the lines rather than in the more intense violence of the free-fire zones, it presents the war as essentially a struggle between self-sacrificing patriots (supported by the communist North Vietnamese) and self-indulgent profiteers (supported by the capitalist Americans). This focus on the wartime black market in South Vietnam may well reflect Hwang Suk-Young’s own experience in the 2nd ROK Marine Brigade, which was deployed to Vietnam from 1965 to 1972. But it also appears to reflect his vision of Cold War South Korea, whose greedy and corrupt military leaders presumably abandoned the goals of reunification and independence for personal profit. By implication, North Korea is the preserve of self-sacrificing patriots still wedded to nationalist, rather than capitalist, goals.

This novel thus evokes the shared fate of Korea and Vietnam. It does not explore the motives (other than profit) for South Korean participation in the war, nor the reactions of individual Koreans to the experience. There is no hint, for instance, of the kind of introspection found in Ahn Junghyo’s [war novel] White Badge, where the protagonist is reminded of his own childhood picking through the garbage of the American soldiers when he sees Vietnamese kids sifting through the rubbish of the Korean troops. Nevertheless, Hwang’s novel is an engrossing tale of individuals caught up in blackmarket plunder within a command economy during the chaos of war. (Although Hwang appears to consider such plunder typical of capitalist economies, I suspect–having spent a year in Romania under Ceausescu–that it is typical of any economy in which an elite has monopoly control of crucial resources, whether that elite meets in corporate boardrooms or in people’s palaces.)

For many Koreans, their participation on the American side during the Vietnam War was quadruply shameful. Not only did they fight on the losing side, but they fought to preserve a divided country, they fought for capitalism, and they fought in a mercenary capacity. Many others, of course, were eager to combat communism and to repay a debt to a vital ally.

The mercenary issue is particularly nettlesome. It’s a toxic label. But it’s hard to deny that, to a certain extent, the Vietnam War provided the same kind of stimulus to South Korea’s postwar economy that the the Korean War did to Japan’s earlier postwar economy (and European wars did to the U.S. economy even earlier). That’s why the same review also considered a related book, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags”: The Hiring of Korean, Filipino and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War, by Robert M. Blackburn (McFarland, 1994).

The mercenary nature of foreign involvement in the war is the central theme of Robert M. Blackburn’s fascinating nonfiction account of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to beg or buy international support for South Vietnam under “The Free World Assistance Program” (commonly labeled “More Flags”), which began in 1964. Blackburn, like Hwang, is a Vietnam War veteran who “had the good fortune to fight alongside, though never with, some units of the ROK Marines, and was never bothered by what label they wore” (155). He is careful to distinguish the soldiers who fight wars from the politicians who make wars, observing that any stigma attached to the word mercenary belongs to the leaders, not to the soldiers.

However, Blackburn offers a more subtle analysis of the status of mercenaries. He notes that individual soldiers may choose to fight for a foreign country for reasons other than simply pay, although the pay itself defines their status as mercenaries. Soldiers-of-fortune may fight for the thrill of it. Others enlist because they believe in the cause they are being paid to fight for. Much the same can be said for entire military units, or even for nations that inject their own troops into foreign wars. “In the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, for example, Franco’s Moroccan battalions fought only for pay, while the opposing members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought for a cause. Both units, however, … shared the common status of mercenaries” (146).

Australia and New Zealand sent military units to Vietnam at their own expense (and therefore not as mercenaries) and for their own reasons. In fact their support for South Vietnam began before Johnson’s More Flags program. Both countries had helped fight communist insurgencies in the Malay Peninsula, and both were alarmed by what Sukarno and his Communist Party allies were doing in Indonesia. Each apparently considered it in its own national interest to help assure the survival of a capitalist South Vietnam. South Korea had at least as much national interest in the survival of South Vietnam as those two countries did. But it also had a “debt of honor” (46) to repay to the allies who helped assure its own survival little more than a decade earlier.

Other countries contributed varying amounts to South Vietnam, from Morocco’s “10,000 cans of sardines worth $2,000” to Japan’s “$55 million worth of economic assistance from a World War II reparations agreement” (141). Most contributed medical supplies and equipment. Costa Rica (actually the Costa Rican Sugar Growers Association) sent an ambulance (143), and South Korea’s first military unit to arrive was a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) [emphasis added] (159). However, of all the More Flags allies, South Korea committed the most troops (50,000 out of the 65,000 in 1968 [158]), suffered the most casualties (4,407 out of the 5,241 killed [xiii]), and reaped the greatest economic benefits in return. Blackburn (64-65) estimates that South Korean soldiers received about $1 billion just in pay, allowances, and benefits alone in 1967-73. A ROK private with a base pay of $1.60 a month could earn $1.00-$1.25 for each day’s service in Vietnam. Still, each ROK soldier cost the U.S. only about half as much as a comparable American soldier.

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