Another Ambassador of Our Country

Give him style points, at least.  A drunken Army private walking past the War Memorial near the Yongsan Garrison and Samgakji Station couldn’t pass up the opportunity he saw in a Seoul city bus.  Seems he had gotten all the way to Seoul Station — and almost all the way back to the War Memorial — when the Korean Police caught up with him.

No word on whether he stopped for passengers.

The first good decision he made was to return the bus.  The second was refusing the Korean breathalyzer test, since that got him brought directly to the Provost Marshal’s office, where he would have been offered the options of (a) the Intoxilyzer 5000 or (b) being strapped to a gurney for a blood draw at 121 Hospital.
I wonder what the soldier’s disciplinary record was.  In other words, should this guy have been off-post in the first place?

I don’t hear about soldiers doing this kind of thing in Germany or elsewhere, and that might be because I haven’t served in Germany and tend not to follow events there.  Neither does the German press, for that matter, at least to the same degree as the Korean press does.  On occasion, I’ve wondered out loud why soldiers do stupid things like this, knowing the kind of impression it makes.  Sometimes, the answer I got was that the Koreans are going hate us anyway.  Like a lot of answers that contain a grain of truth, it’s simplistic, self-serving, and wrong.  I cringe when things like this happen.