U.S. Army Sergeant Charged for Assault After Punching Korean Man for Allegedly Staring at His Wife

I have been stared at and my wife called names in Korea, but I knew getting in any altercation would only lead to me being the loser legally which is what this sergeant is about to find out:

A U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) sergeant in his 30s is under investigation for allegedly assaulting an 18-year-old male student in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, leaving the teenager with severe injuries.

According to the police, the sergeant, identified as A, is accused of punching the teenager, B, in the face near Pyeongtaek Station around 12:30 a.m. on Nov. 17. The attack caused significant injuries, and A has been charged with assault. The Pyeongtaek Police Station booked Sergeant A on charges of assault.

The victim’s father described the severity of the injuries during an interview with JTBC on Nov. 19. “The doctor said it was hard to believe this injury was caused by a person’s fist,” he said. “In all his years as a plastic surgeon, he had never seen bones damaged to this extent from a punch.”

He added that B would need to wear oral prosthetics and keep his jaw stabilized for at least eight weeks. “The injuries are so severe that he might suffer lifelong complications,” the father said.

The sergeant claimed that he was also assaulted by B, prompting police to charge the teenager with assault. However, CCTV footage from the scene does not show B physically reacting to the sergeant’s actions.

The altercation reportedly began when A confronted B, asking, “Why are you staring at me?” Witnesses mentioned that A had been arguing loudly with a Korean woman at the time, which attracted the attention of passersby.

The father added, “The Korean woman with the sergeant cursed at my son, asking why he was staring. My son responded that he wasn’t looking, but she kept pointing at him and approaching. As she continued swearing and pushing his chest, the sergeant punched my son when he was unprepared.”

Korea Times via a reader tip

You can red more at the link, but the sergeant be ready to pay a large compensation payment to the man he punched.

This incident does remind of an incident 20 years ago when a Korean female that worked at Gyeongbokgung Palace started screaming at me and falsely claiming I was laughing at her.

I was leading a group of Soldiers with one of my KATUSAs to visit Gyeongbokgung Palace. When we arrived we were excited to see that a changing of the palace guards was taking place. The guards wore armor and carried medieval weapons and marched around with flags.

I asked my KATUSA what the flags represented and he didn’t know. So he told me he would ask one of the people who worked at Gyeongbokgung if they knew. He walked over to a young lady in a traditional hanbok who obviously worked at the palace and asked her if she knew what the flags meant. She didn’t know and my KATUSA asked the other palace people if they knew. None of them knew.  My KATUSA walked back over and told me that none of them knew. I then checked a tourist brochure of Gyeongbokgung and I started laughing because all the definitions for all the flags was in the brochure the whole time while we were trying to find out what they meant.

Right after this the young female worker came over and started screaming at me in Korean and then in English she said that this is an anti-American area that we cannot go here and we should leave. I told her if she is anti-American that is her problem, not mine because I get along with Koreans just fine.  She then began screaming at my KATUSA in Korean saying that we were laughing at her because she didn’t know what the flags meant and wanted me to apologize. My KATUSA told her we were not laughing at her and she misunderstood what we were laughing at. We were laughing at having the brochure with us the whole time and not knowing what the flags meant. She kept going on in Korean screaming at us trying to get me to apologize.

By this time everyone was now staring at me getting screamed at by this Korean woman in hanbok. We just walked away and left, but fortunately no one punched me in the face like this sergeant did to the Korean man for supposedly staring at his wife. Like what happened to me, it was probably just a misunderstanding that the sergeant overreacted to.