Howdy folks,
I asked this question in r/military but I guess I might have more success here. For those people who are familiar with age of conscription/enlistment and/or are familiar or have knowledge of how it was during the Vietnam era (I know the age reckoning has changed to international age vs Korean age recently) I wanted to confirm a couple things I already suspect are true that open up a can of worms.
During the Vietnam era, age of conscription was reckoned via Korean age amongst men who turned 19 in the hojeok, correct? The same as it would have been for entry into high school and middle school and elementary school preceding it, is it not?
So for example, if a man were born in 1946, it would be plausible that he would have enlisted into the ROK Marine Corps at age 19 (Korean age at 1965) as hasa, been trained up, then demonstrated enough capability to volunteer and be selected to go to Vietnam in 1966, right? It wouldn’t at all be plausible if the same man were born in 1948 to have done his first tour of Vietnam in 1966 because 1.) regardless of his birthday, that’s not how the Korean government calculated age at that time, 2. he would have been 17 upon enlistment and 18 upon deployment for Vietnam as an NCO and 3.) even so 19 was the age of majority at the time, not 18 by international age and 4.) so on for all the reasons a 1948 birthday doesn’t fit a 1966 ROKMC start for a tour of duty in Vietnam.
Am I correct in all of this or is there something I am not considering here? Because there are some followup questions I have because this small distortion and deception may have had major, meaningful impacts later on in life, including my own.
I’ve recently had reason to examine my past and in several moments of revelation, I started putting two and two together and started to realize why certain things my parents did and said about their past, why distant acquaintances might have said things that didn’t quite make sense to me, quirks of my parents that I never thought much about, etc. Weaved all together, it’s quite a story of international intrigue, war, espionage, organized crime, romance, tragedy, exile, homecoming, heartbreak that spans multiple generations and starts with a borscht loving Korean student in Soviet Russia and a couple of Yangban children brought up in Japanese households raised to be Japanese, one sent to Kyoto university (along with his brothers, one of whom would later grow up to become one of Korea’s first jet fighter pilots) the soon to be wife attending the women’s university. Down the generations, we have a gender noncomforming child who will become one of the, if not the first, female 4th dan (instructor level) Taekwondo black belt, a war hero (who gives away his entire war earnings in disgust – for scholarships for disadvantaged students), a spy (for which government on which government I’m not entirely sure just yet), and a bunch of other stock characters any Korean-American will find familiar but no less interesting – the Silicon Valley guy, the KAL pilots, the American soldiers and Marines, illegal gambling parlor proprieters, spa owners, students at various Ivy plus schools, a Doctor Without Borders, etc.
But first I need to confirm the birthday Vietnam thing to see if this a fact based Korean-American diasporic Alex Haley’s Roots type of thing or a bipolar delusional grandeur flight of fantasy.
submitted by /u/Talon_Ho
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