Flight or fight: conscription misery in South Korea
Conscription in South Korea has been blighted by deadly rampages and high suicide rates. The first national to win asylum to avoid military service tells Julian Ryall the same fate could soon befall Japan
Sergeant Lim was only three months short of completing his compulsory national service in the South Korean military when he finally snapped.
After ending his watch on the evening of June 21 at an outpost monitoring the demilitarised zone that divides the Korean peninsula, Lim reportedly returned from the front line, drew the pin on a hand grenade and threw it at seven colleagues preparing to go on duty. He emptied the magazine of his machine gun at the injured men, killing one. He reloaded and shot another two soldiers on his way to a barracks block. One died immediately, the other succumbed to his injuries later.
But Lim’s rampage was not over. Next he went into the living quarters and continued firing, killing one more colleague. A fifth soldier died as he attempted to raise the alarm. As well as the dead, seven members of Lim’s unit were injured.
Leaving chaos in his wake, 22-year-old Lim fled into the mountains that punctuate Goseong county. Over the next 24 hours, he was involved in skirmishes with troops dispatched to catch him and ignored pleas by his father over loudspeakers to give himself up. Eventually cornered and with troops closing in, Lim attempted to kill himself with a gunshot, but only managed to inflict an injury to his abdomen.
In the subsequent investigation, the army determined that Lim had been an outsider in school and remained distant after starting his compulsory national service. A psychological assessment 15 months before his rampage warned that he was at risk of attempting suicide or causing an incident.
The ultimate trigger on that hot June evening appears to have been a cartoon drawn by one of his squad on the cover of the unit surveillance log depicting Lim as the SpongeBob SquarePants character. The inquiry was also shown a letter that Lim wrote shortly before he attempted to take his own life.
“Whatever wrong they committed, murder is an enormous deed,” he wrote. “But anyone in my situation would have suffered a life as painful as death. I’ve done wrong – but so have they.”