Asian Correspondent Asia News

I credit the military service for why Korean mean are so well-behaved. I’ll take a rude spitting ajeossi who vomits on the sidewalk before passing out on the subway over the violent aggressive men who ruin Friday and Saturday nights all over our home countries..

What about gyopos? Are they part of the “violent, aggressive men all over our home countries” in which you speak?

Considering all the US soldiers who are in Korea, Korean men and women and gyopos in Korea should all serve in place of American nationals.

All should serve at least three to five years or even longer.

It really sucks if you go in with a lousy attitude (it’s only as stressful as you allow it to be), lack discipline, and the only physical activity you’ve ever done was gym class and played competitive Starcraft. In my experience, serving in the military was a very positive experience.

I don’t believe mandatory service is necessary any more, either. However, I still don’t have sympathy for the guys trying to avoid it. I have even less sympathy for people like Lee Hoi-chang’s sons who went on ultra-diets to avoid the draft for being “underweight”, and get things swept under the rug because of who their dad is, while those without such connections have no choice but to enlist.

As long as it is the law of the land, there are consequences to your actions. How many times do we, as foreigners, keep getting told that we are not in our home country any more, we are in Korea, and we must abide by Korea’s laws, and why should we get special treatment from police just because we are foreigners, yadda yadda… How does this admonishment stop applying when it is Koreans breaking the laws?

I have more respect for the conscientious objectors, who refuse to enlist for religious reasons and are WILLING to go to jail for those religious reasons rather than compromise them by enlisting. They refuse to adhere to the law and accept the consequences. More power to them.

But the scammers who want on the one hand to avoid the draft and on the other hand to avoid the consequences of that decision? No respect whatsoever.

I don’t have a problem with it on grounds of practicality – North Korea IS a military threat. Not to the world, but to their immediate neighbor to the south. They have one of the largest militaries in the world and could do a LOT of damage before the US military got here to bitch-slap them.

No, my problem with mandatory service is the indoctrination factor. The reason women are moving forward faster than men in Korea is because they don’t have to do two years of gender indoctrination in the military. If you don’t believe me, compare a guy you knew before service to who he is after – I can promise you he’s taken a good step toward becoming the typical “adjoshi.”

mandatory military service should continue long enough for me to write and direct a fish-out-of-water comedy about a thirty year-old english teacher becoming a naturalized citizen and being forced into the service

I know that a lot of people won’t have much sympathy for these men, but I do. Compulsory military service strikes me as an anachronism of a time when Koreabeat wrote:
North Korea was actually a military threat, and these days I doubt it does much to appreciably affect South Korea’s national security.

South Korea probably could make due with an all-volunteer force, but it would have to be a very large all-volunteer force. North Korea is a military threat still, even if (or perhaps because) they are in a weakened state, “crippled tiger hits the dragon” and all that.

But two factors prevent the leap to an all-volunteer force: the sheer cost and the sense of adherence to an egalitarian ideal that pervades policymaking. Military service is the great equalizer, which is why few people feel any sympathy for draft dodgers, especially the rich (like Lee Hoichang’s kids), which may be why he lost twice even though there was great distrust for his two opponents.

Besides that, it sucks and is a major infringement on a person’s liberty and robs them of two years of earning power.

Hopefully someone will point out that it costs more money for the government to put everyone in uniform than a select few(er), both in terms of lost national wealth and in terms of the blow to demographics.

I don’t have a problem with the blow to individual freedom, though. After all, freedom can be something more valued if it’s earned.

On the other hand, the only constituency for abolishing mandatory service is 16 to 22 year old boys who have no power. Women all seem to love it, because of they course they don’t have to serve,

I don’t know any women who love it. They’re boyfriends and their sons have to take time off to go play soldier, and it disrupts their lives as well. They certainly have little desire to go in their boyfriend’s or son’s stead, but that doesn’t mean they love it.

and even men who agree with me often seem to want their kids to suffer because… well, because they had to, I guess.

I think a lot of people see some value in it as well. I know a lot of people who talk about ways to improve the experience, but few that want to get rid of it altogether (or at least few that feel they can). And I know a lot of people who feel they got something good — maturity, confidence, pride — out of the experience. An awful lot of people, in fact.

I admire and applaud any form of resistance to this kind of military enslavement anywhere in the world. Remember that the state and government exist to serve people, not the other way around. When you see the enforced deconstruction of an individual psyche and it’s reassembling into an efficient tool, that’s when you are staring into the eyes of the “devil”. It’s this subjugation of individual freedom and conscience that enables crimes such as genocide to happen.