they KNOW a lot of countries can go after them. So why did Merrill Newman even go to North Korea? Because America got too boring?

He didn't deserve this, but boy howdy did he ever walk right into it. I heard this story when it first came to light. He actually had the delusion nerve to say he thought a trip to North Korea would be fun. North Korea. Fun. Motherfucking North Korea. Fun! Idiot.

idiot for even going there.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/july-dec13/northkorea_07-25.html

"Among those attending today's ceremonies were two decorated U.S. veterans of the Korean War. They were on a mission to find the remains of a fellow aviator killed at the Chosin Reservoir in 1950. But flooding prevented them from visiting the site of one of the war's deadliest battles."

Those men came and visited North Korean memorial ceremonies, with NK vets attending, without incident. The NK military helped search for the remains of one of the American's missing comrades.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/21/world/asia/north-korea-veterans

He probably would have been fine, but this sounds like a case of mistaken identity. War crimes were certainly committed by all sides, as in every war, but I doubt someone who was involved in them would go back.

have this delusion that NK is a safe place to visit, with that spoiled little nutter in charge. You only have to listen to the news of executions over crap like watching a satellite tv program from South Korea, for ex, to take this shit hole off your fun vacation list. It is an actual nightmare for the good people who live there and not a place to go to watch suffering people stuck in hell like animals on a zoo.

I read that the last guy from the U.S. that they imprisoned was an American of Korean ethnicity, who was charged/found guilty of some law ( trumped up charge) and is doing 15 f'g years of hard labor. Great trip abroad.....

South Korea is a lovely place, so he could have visited there for a fun memory trip of his time in Korea in the war, if that floated his boat, and done it without such a grave personal risk. He of all people should have known better. I wonder if he will make it out of Korea this time or if he will die there.

As a combat veteran, the hardest part for me was coming home. Although I hated the war and I would say that I hated fighting in one, I miss it tremendously. Having had nearly 10 years to reflect on my time in Iraq, I've come to realize that if I had the opportunity to go back that I'd do it in a heartbeat regardless of the danger.

I'm willing to bet that returning to North Korea and even being held as a prisoner probably gives him a sense of closure that most of us could never understand.

There are many videos on you-tube of people who went there. Though many of them are British or Canadian. There's one video about a team of doctors who go to do surgery on people's eyes there, and one person is the narrator and she is American. She does mention being unwelcome there, but when there doesn't run into any trouble.

This guy is of an age where he could have been a Korean War US soldier. But then how could they know that? Maybe they are just saying that.

And still, they have no right to do this, of course.

Here the Korean War is a non-issue. It's probably as forgotten as the Spanish-American War. There it's not. Some cultures view honor differently. Those cultures, if there's a national defeat, dwell on it until it's a large cancerous growth on their national psyche.

If your culture isn't into public honor, or chucks the concept to a large extent, then losses aren't such a big deal. They make make you angry, but not in the same way. Centuries of repression left Jews, for instance, able to joke about their status and find ways to have dignity in spite of it.

In other cases, it festers until it bursts forth in unbridled jingoism as soon as the physical and technological base is sufficient. This was Germany in the '30s. It's increasingly China and Iran. Usually when we read contemporaneous reports of those countries in the English-language press all of that gets deleted as propaganda and hyperbole, as filler of no interest to us. It's a kind of cultural blindness. It was nonsense in the Russian-language press in the '80s and '90s, until Putin rode it to power: The "filler" turned out to be the news, but even then most reporters, northerners or native to mostly Puritan and Enlightenment ways of thinking, thought it just short lived. This kind of thing finds no resonance with us, it's hard to understand, to sort out, and requires sustained attention of at least 30 minutes. Making it easy to understand how most Americans can't figure it out.

It's the same kind of trait that makes Fourth of July a kind of vacuous holiday in the US. We don't dwell on national defeats. We ignore them. We don't dwell on national victories. Heck, we pretty much ignore them, too. Well, many of us do. Some don't. There are subcultures in the US that still bear a strong imprint of public honor. They have higher rates of murder, more fights, and some tend to carry flags to remind them of their defeat.


If he was going through passport control and the agent said, "How did you enjoy your stay?" or "Did you like our country?" and he responded, "Better than the last time I was here, during the war" it would have been enough for some pre-offended jingoist to report him. The timing's right, too. And on the way out he'd have been more likely to let down his guard.

Which he admitted to in his book basically.

Wow, that tells you something about how insane they are. So they consider all who served in the war they started to be "criminals?"

"Your grandchildren committed wrongthink" is enough to get you into a camp over there.

Assuming anyone on the other side in the war is a criminal is saner by comparison.

Their entire country believes that at any moment they will be re-absorbing the south.

They'll lock you up and hold you for ransom.

I feel bad for this guy. But visiting NK isn't like visiting Vietnam. These folks hate us.

Okay, bad example. Never mind.

He might get someone important to mount a rescue attempt.