The Complexities Faced by South Korean Vietnam War Veterans: The Impact Towards Agent Orange Exposure

Abstract

Although the Vietnam War (1955 - 1975) is widely acknowledged as a conflict that stemmed from intense American intervention that elongated the ongoing armed struggle for colonial independence, the magnitude of international forces that assisted the national security of South Vietnam during the war is usually shadowed by the notoriety of American presence and their wide-scale military operations. The nations that aided the American effort to retain a non-communist state in Indochina are South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines, and even Spain to a certain medicinal extent. From this American-led coalition under the Many Flags Campaign, the nation that sent the second-largest contingent, only eclipsed by the United States forces, is South Korea.

The ambition of this paper is to analyze the extent of South Korean service in Vietnam and specifically, underlie the implications these veterans faced following their service in a foreign environment. Ultimately, from the research conducted and through the extraction of experiences from veterans, the final deduction can be asserted that South Korean service in Vietnam not only affected the lives of veterans mentally but physically through the utilization of militarized chemicals such as Agent Orange. It would be further discovered, that the continued use of deleterious chemicals throughout the South Korean peninsula, especially the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), would continue the health hazards of conscripted soldiers stationed in adverse areas.