By This is the first that I have heard of this happening:
Two South Korean soldiers defected to North Korea apparently through communist forces during the Vietnam War, the defense ministry in Seoul said Friday.
The revelation came a day after the South Korean government said it would pay compensation to the family of a man believed to have been sent to North Korea after being captured by North Vietnamese forces in the mid-1960s. [Yonhap]
12:58 pm on May 3rd, 2009 1
Interesting, but very little information other that it appears to have happened.
3:42 am on May 4th, 2009 2
I've never heard that either but it's not surprising since USFK had a few do it.
Also, I can remember reading a handful of stories about how brutal the ROK military was to its soldiers and how ruthless it was in Vietnam. Things like in Korea, a USFK officer was making the rounds inspecting outposts with his Korean counter-part with the Korean bunkers being next to the USFK ones.
In the US one, the GIs were asleep on duty and the American bitched them out. Then they found the Koreans also asleep in their bunker, and the Korean officer shot one of them in the head and had the other toss his body on top of the bunker as a sign to the others.
And I'm sure most readers here will remember that one thing we've heard about since the 2000s is the setting up of commissions to investigate these kinds of incidents in the past — the high number of "suicides" that occurred in the military for the democratic era.
So, it's not surprising some people chose to head North rather than kill themselves — but on hindsight, I wonder which they'd choose if they had to do it all over again?