More Vietnam Era Documents Declassified

The Korean government has declassified additional documents highlighting specifics about the ROK Army deployment to Vietnam:

Korean president Park Chung-hee in the later 1960s proposed a regional defense body with Japan and Taiwan to combat the spread of communism, newly declassified documents reveal. The dossier related to the Vietnam War made public on Friday also shatters persistent myths by showing that Korean soldiers who fought in the war were paid the same as their Thai and Filipino counterparts, and that the money did go to the soldiers and was not used by the state to boost Korea’s economic development, as some have charged.

It shouldn’t be a huge shock that President Park was trying to create a regional defense body with Japan and Taiwan at the time because it was the height of the Cold War and South Korea wasn’t nearly as strong national power as they are now. The ROK Army soldiers I have met who fought in the Vietnam War always felt unappreciated by Korea and dismissed as mercenaries for Washington. The fact that they were receiving their combat pay will probably only reenforce that stereotype, but those ROK Army soldiers that fought in Vietnam should be looked at no differently than the foreign troops that came to Korea’s aid when communist aggression threatened to take over the country. All the soldiers that served in both Korea and Vietnam are heroes and shouldn’t be dismissed or forgotten.