Category: Good Neighbors

From the Stars and Stripes:

Harriet Hodges has a lot of heart — at least 3,017, not counting her own.

It started in the early 1970s when Hodges learned the daughter of the chef at the former golf course on Yongsan Garrison couldn’t get proper treatment here for a heart problem.

By the time she left South Korea in the mid-1990s, Hodges had convinced major air carriers to give up seats, local nurses to serve as translators and escorts, and American cardiologists to book operating rooms for free — all for South Korean children who had little access to specialized health care here.

Last week, Hodges returned to Seoul for a visit, including reunions with the families of the children she helped. Many of them now have families and children of their own. On Oct. 22, Korean families from Busan, Daegu, Incheon, Seoul and other cities gathered to honor her.

“They said, ‘Look at what you have done,’ ” she recalled Thursday morning over coffee at the Dragon Hill Lodge on Yongsan. “They all call me Halmonie” — the Korean word for grandmother.

She also received an award this week from Gen. B.B. Bell, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, for her contributions during the past three decades.

r every taxi cab related incident or in this case bus related incident, there are at least two good news stories you won’t hear much about. The Stars and Stripes on the other hand has two good news stories worth reading.The first story is about soldiers from Camp Casey helping to teach English at local schools:

After being stationed here for seven months, Colvin says he knows that some South Koreans see U.S. soldiers and think “trouble.”

The public relations value of participating in a volunteer fair wasn’t lost on him and other soldiers.

“A lot of kids get better impressions of soldiers this way,” Colvin said. “It’s also a better way to learn more English through conversation than just through a book. And it looks like the kids enjoy it.”

The kid in this next story is a real hero:

The man got two boys to safety but one of his sons had disappeared under about seven to eight feet of water.

Over the next seven or so minutes, Adam, an eighth-grader at the International Christian School in Pyeongtaek, made 10 to 15 dives.

“I swam straight to the bottom and was feeling around and I resurfaced, and I just breathed in a huge gulp of air and went back down,” he said. “It was really, really murky.”

He found the boy and brought him up.

The father and another fisherman began trying to resuscitate the boy, but neither seemed familiar with how to do it.

“I tell you, I never felt so helpless in my whole life because here I had two cell phones and I didn’t know how to call for help and I didn’t know how to tell them they were doing CPR wrong,” Heather Budge said.

Make sure you read the whole article because it is a good read about this young boy doing a heroic deed in saving the child’s life. So what are the odds that any Korean will remember a heroic story like this a year from now, but they can still recall the Great Shinchon Massacre of 2004? I know one family that won’t forget is the family of the boy that this one courageous Osan teen saved.

Nomad provides a link to this story about US soldiers rescuing an elderly Korean woman and her handicapped daughter from a fire in Uijongbu:

Two Camp Red Cloud Soldiers saved an elderly woman and her handicapped daughter when a sandwich shop caught fire just outside the camp’s front gate July 1.

Pvt. Reid Erickson and Pvt. Russell McCanless Jr. of Headquarters and Headquarters Support Company, Special Troops Battalion, were first on the scene when New York Sub sandwich shop caught fire.

¿We walked out of 7 Club to see whether or not I could do handstand pushups, and when I was doing them I noticed something behind us,¿ Erickson said. Standing and turning around, he saw smoke coming from the shop.

Rushing to the fire, they tried opening the glass door to the sandwich shop to find it hot and locked. The Soldiers then sought assistance at a Korean Police booth outside the gate.

¿We realized when we came back that there was an apartment upstairs and rang the buzzer,¿ Erickson said. ¿Finally an elderly lady came downstairs and she didn¿t speak English. The only thing she could say is `Come in! Come in!¿ She was pretty frantic about it, so we ran upstairs.¿

Upstairs, the elderly woman pointed toward a bedroom behind thick smoke.

¿She pointed toward the bedroom and her daughter came crawling out. She was paralyzed,¿ Erickson said.

By the time the Soldiers got both women downstairs via an external stairwell on the side of the building, the paramedics and fire department had already arrived.

Great job by these two guys and good thing PVT Erickson can do handstand pushups. I don’t hold much hope if this story being covered in the Korean media though. I bet if they jumped on top of a taxi cab after rescuing the family than it would make the Korean news.

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UPDATE: Here is the link to an article in the Stars and Stripes:

Neither Jung nor her daughter suffered serious injuries from the fire. For that, the soldiers have Jung¿s eternal gratitude.

¿How can anyone enter a burning house to save a stranger? It is not an easy act at all,¿ Jung said in a phone interview. ¿And what I am truly impressed about by the American men is that they know exactly how to treat a disabled person in a dangerous situation. I can¿t thank them enough in words.¿

I wonder if these quotes will ever be published in the Korean media?

Here is a good news story, that USFK will never get credit for in the Korean media, that was published in the Stars and Stripes:

Orphans from Dongducheon got a taste of holiday fun here Thursday at a Thanksgiving feast served up by 2nd Infantry Division soldiers.

The dinner, served at the 4th Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment Dining Facility, was for children from the My Home Orphanage. It was part of the division’s Good Neighbor Program, said 2nd Lt. Tae H. Rose with Headquarters Headquarters Company, 1st Heavy Brigade Combat Team.

Rose, 34, who was born in South Korea but raised by adoptive relatives in New York City, said he felt a special bond with the My Home kids.

“My parents both passed away when I was a child. My aunt was married to a GI and she adopted me,?explained Rose, who grew up speaking English but studied Korean in college.

After graduating, he worked five years for an advertising agency in South Korea to hone his language skills before joining the Army five years ago. South Korea is his first overseas tour, he said.

Soldiers with his unit visit My Home regularly to play with the orphans there, he said.

This is a common event throughout USFK spending time with children from the orphanages not only during the Holidays but also during regular weekends. There is never a shortage of volunteers to go spend time with kid’s at orphanages or other activities like teaching English at area public schools.

However, all the good will these soldiers create is always seems to be negated by a couple of idiots getting drunk and standing on top of a taxi and the story is spread all over the Korean media.

Over at the Marmot’s Hole he has a great post about the 2ID soldiers that went and helped harvest rice for one of the fathers of the two girls that were accidentally killed three years ago in the tracked vehicle accident. Marmot has got an English translation of the Donga Ilbo post on his site and the JoongAng Ilbo has an English language article on it’s site which I have posted below:

A group of American and Korean soldiers helped bring in the harvest here. In the course of the work, they seem to have gone a long way toward assuaging some of the anguish that followed the deaths of two young girls three years ago.
The U.S. 2nd Infantry Division learned that farmers in this area would have a difficult time bringing in this year’s crop, and some of the division’s soldiers volunteered to help. Among the areas where they worked were fields belonging to Shin Hyeon-su, the father of Shin Hyo-sun, one of the two teenage girls struck and killed by an American military vehicle in June 2002.

“After the heavy rainfall early last month, the rice plants were all severely bent, making it impossible to harvest them with machines,” Mr. Shin said. “We really needed helping hands to harvest with sickles. I appreciate the U.S. and South Korean soldiers’ help very much.”
A group of 17 Korean and 23 U.S. soldiers was working in the rice paddies in this northern farming area Tuesday morning. Some American soldiers, who had never used sickles to cut rice, were learning the Korean way of harvesting.
They finished the job in Mr. Shin’s paddies late in the day, fueled by food prepared by the Shins and other village residents. Mr. Shin said the help was unexpected.

The village head, Shim Su-bo, also said he welcomed the help. He is the father of Shim Mi-seon, the other girl who lost here life in the accident, which occurred during a U.S. training exercise.
“We feel thankful to the American soldiers, who did not forget about the victims’ families,” Mr. Shim said.

The road deaths provoked a firestorm of anti-American demonstrations around the nation, which was rekindled when two soldiers involved in the incident were acquitted at courts-martial.
That outrage, however, was nowhere to be seen this week in the Yangju paddies.

I think it is great that 2ID was able to help with the rice harvest and hopefully this will be something that we can continue to help with in the future to go along with all the other volunteer work that 2ID and the rest of USFK does on the peninsula. However, on Marmot’s site there has been a debate about whether these soldiers were forced to work in the fields or if they truly volunteered. I can assure everyone that these soldiers were in fact volunteers. Soldiers love doing things like this that are positive and make a difference. Whenever there is a community activity that needs assistance, whether it be the orphanage or English teaching, there is never a shortage of volunteers. Believe it or not many soldiers, airmen, Marines, etc. want to do positive activities such as this when given the opportunity.

Not everyone in USFK jumps on taxi cabs, but that is unfortunately what makes the newspapers and not all the other positive things USFK does in Korea. Fortunately this one positive event did get published which I think is a step in the right direction. Hopefully more like it get published.