hankyoreh

North Chungcheong Province. (Yonhap News)　

By Park Byong-su, senior staff writer

During POW training in a special forces unit, two non-commissioned officers (NCO) died after losing consciousness. Another NCO was hospitalized and is receiving treatment.

“Between 10:30 pm and 10:40 pm on of Sept. 2, two staff sergeants, surnamed Lee, 23, and Cho, 21, who were attached to the 13th airborne special brigade in Jeungpyeong, North Chungcheong Province, lost consciousness while receiving special training. They were transferred to a nearby civilian hospital in Cheongju where they died. The doctors concluded that the cause of death was asphyxiation,” a senior military officer said on Sept. 3. Another staff sergeant surnamed Jeon, 23, also blacked out and collapsed during the same training, but he returned to consciousness at the hospital.

The training program, which was officially called “Tricks to Try When Taken Prisoner,” was designed to help participants overcome the fear and isolation of being trapped in a small room with eyes covered when captured by enemy forces. “At the time of the accident, 10 of the 24 participants in the training were told to take part in the POW roleplay. They knelt down with a hood over their head and their hands and feet tied behind them, to learn how to overcome their loneliness and fear. That’s when the accident happened,” the military officer said.

This was the first time that the training exercise was attempted, and no one in South Korea had ever experienced it before, military sources said. The exercise took place two times that day, once in the morning and once in the evening. The morning exercise began at 8:20 and lasted for two hours and forty minutes. The evening exercise started at 9:00 and was interrupted after one hour and thirty or forty minutes, the time when the accident occurred.

The hood that was placed on the trainees’ heads was made of black polyester and looked like a shoe pouch with a string that can be pulled tight to seal the opening. Since the material does not allow air to pass through, there are concerns that this could have suffocated the soldiers. The string of the hood was not pulled tightly during the morning drill, but it was during the evening drill in order to increase the drill’s intensity, thus inadvertently increasing the chance of an accident.

Furthermore, even though this was a dangerous exercise that was being introduced for the first time, the preparations that were done in advance were not adequately thorough. Preliminary research on the drill was carried out from April to June on the orders of Lieutenant General Jeong In-beom, special warfare commander. The research was based on drill books from special Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training in the US and the UK. Since no one in Korea had done the POW activity drill before, the military had no actual experience to refer to, sources said.

“The special forces tell us that a long time ago they did a similar drill,” the military officer said, while acknowledging that at the moment there are no soldiers in South Korea who had any experience with this kind of exercise.

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