Pig Slaughtering GI?

I have seen USFK accused of a lot of ridiculous things in Korea, but this one takes the cake.  I was walking through Myeongdong the other day and in the middle of this busy Seoul shopping district was a group of what appeared to be college aged students who were collecting signatures for a petition to stop pig slaughtering.  Apparently a veteran’s group and some local politicians slaughtered a pig during a recent protest.  The petitioners weren’t happy about it and to show their displeasure they hoped to have people sign their petition after reading this flyer:

Normally I would hardly care about something like this and just walk on by.  However something immediately caught my attention.  To help make their case the group had a large scale blow up of pictures from the pig slaughter and were making anti-military statements.  Here is what caught my eye, in the first blow up picture, there appeared to be a USFK soldier participating in the pig slaughter:

I was immediately suspicious of this because I just found it absurd that anyone in USFK would be involved in a veteran’s protest much less involved in slaughtering a pig.   The petitioners didn’t have the signs labeled with anything anti-USFK but their comments as well as the intent of prominently displaying this photograph like they did was clear, they were linking USFK to this pig slaughter.

My wife and I were standing there within a large crowd of people who had gathered around the pictures and my mother in law who was with us asked me why USFK was involved in a pig slaughter?  Probably everyone else in the crowd was thinking the same thing.  You can actually see pictures of the crowd around their booth in Myeongdong on the group’s website here and then scrolling to the bottom of the page.

After looking closely at the picture I could tell whoever was wearing the American Army Combat Uniform (ACU) was not a USFK soldier.  The person in the picture if you look closely is wearing tennis shoes.  Even further more the person is wearing non-military issue gloves.  You can’t tell to well from the quality of the picture I took, but the gloves in the original picture definitely had name brand markings on them and were not military issue gloves.  Also notice how the picture was cropped in order to not see the head of the supposed USFK soldier.  These inconsistencies lead me to greatly doubt any involvement of USFK.

However, the damage has already been done and who knows how many thousands of people are now walking around thinking USFK was involved in the slaughter of some pig that USFK actually had nothing to do with.  Just another incident to feed the low level hum of anti-Americanism as well as the ever increasing anti-ROK Army sentiment in the country.