Word: pang
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Christian missionaries in Korea and friends of Pang Wha Il, the victim, were indignant. Said the Rev. Chun Pil Sun, of the Seoul presbytery: "The American military army obviously places different value on the lives of Koreans and Americans ... A Korean's life apparently means nothing." Added a U.S. missionary in Korea: "I am ashamed to face the Christians I know here...
...later, a better thing happened. The World Council of Churches offered Pang a year's scholarship in the U.S. He headed for his brother's home near Suwon to tell him the wonderful news. The brother was away, and Pang settled down to wait. There, on the night of last Dec. 5, violence caught up with Pang again. As the story was pieced together later by Army investigators, a white U.S. Army lieutenant and three Negro G.I.s burst into the freezing mud-and-stick hut where Pang, his sister-in-law and her two children lay huddled...
...lieutenant slugged Pang with his flashlight, then pistol-whipped him with a .45. Pang slumped to the floor, senseless. Rushed by a jeep to a Marine sick bay, then by helicopter to a hospital ship, Pang Wha II died four days later without regaining consciousness...
...weeks nothing happened. The soldiers involved were Army engineers, attached to the Air Force, building a Marine base, and Pang had died on a Navy ship. "Nobody," explained an Army officer, "can decide who should hold the court-martial." The case might have outlasted the war had not the correspondent of a small Chicago monthly, Christian Life, mailed the story. The influential Christian Century picked it up, demanded that the Army "make sure this case is not whitewashed ... and that Washington fully recognizes the seriousness of this shocking affair...
...Pang's dull-eyed and incoherent widow and their four children, they huddled in a 15-by-30-ft. tent, which they shared with three others in a Pusan slum. Cardboard stuffed along the sides blocked out some of the cold, but in the middle of the room a pan of water froze quite hard. At week's end nobody from the Army had called on the family; a spokesman explained that "no administrative procedures have been drawn" to handle this sort of thing...