5. DPRKLOL

The South Koreans deployed the second largest expeditionary force, after the Americans. They had a reputation for being particularly ruthless among the Vietnamese.

When you are born with a name like Bonesteel, I think you have to become a general. There is no other option; Professor Bonesteel sounds wrong.

January 1968 was a terrible month for U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. On top of the events described here, a USAF B-52 bomber with four nuclear weapons crashed into the icy waters off Greenland on January 22. All of these events occurred within the last 11 days of January. Johnson wrote of this period, “I Sometimes Felt That I Was Living in a Continuous Nightmare” (Bolger 2011, 69).

As far as I can tell, none of them became church pastors.

In addition, a high school student in the audience died in the crossfire. The ROK government executed Mun four months later.

In the 1970s, Kim Pyong-Il and Kim Jong-Il were heated rivals. In order make life a little easier for his favorite son, Kim Il-Sung made Pyong-Il North Korea’s ambassador to Yugoslavia and sent him packing. Separated from his personal networks and out of the sight of influential party officials, it would be too difficult for Pyong-Il to mount a serious campaign for party leader upon the death of Kim Il-Sung. To this day, Pyong-Il is still part of North Korea’s diplomatic corps. His current post is Ambassador to the Czech Republic.

You will not find Rangoon, Burma on a map unless it was published before 1989. Rangoon, Burma is now known as Yangon, Myanmar. Long story short, a military junta de-anglicized the country’s name as part of an anti-colonial campaign in the wake of its illegal seizure of power. Yay for independence, boo for autocracy.

The last one at the time of writing was just before the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics with NBC News. See Bill Neely. “North Korean Ex-Spy Kim Hyon-hui Casts Doubt on Kim Jong Un’s Olympic Motives,” NBC News, January 24, 2018. www.​nbcnews.​com/​news/​north-korea/​north-korean-ex-spy-kim-hyon-hui-casts-doubt-kim-n839746.

North Korea brings its weird A-game wherever its athletes go. At the same tournament, observers were initially impressed by the throngs of vocal North Korean fans. Later on, journalists discovered that those supposed North Korean fans were actually Chinese paid by the North Korean government to pose as North Koreans.

Who better to lecture accomplished international athletes than Kim Jong-Il? According to popular legend, he set the international record for a round of golf with an unprecedented thirty-eight strokes under par. Impressively, it was the first time he ever swung a golf club. Kim Jong-Un has yet to rival his father’s boss golf skills, but he did recently design Pyongyang’s first putt-putt course. See Josh Sens, “The Real Story Behind One of the Most Fabled Rounds in Golf” Golf Magazine (June 1, 2016), accessed on March 11, 2018 at http://​www.​golf.​com/​golf-plus/​behind-kim-jong-ils-famous-round-golf.

Kim’s son would learn his lesson in time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Martin Rogers (2017) writes that the government told its people that North Korea won the tournament. In reality, it did not.

Nearly seventeen years to the date, a journalist found and verified an old set of fake Brazilian passports for Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un, to be used in case of an anti-Kim revolution. See Guy Faulconbridge, “Exclusive: North Korean Leaders Used Brazilian Passports to Apply for Western Visas” Reuters Wire Service (February 27, 2018), accessed on February 27, 2018 at https://​www.​reuters.​com/​article/​us-northkorea-kim-passports-exclusive/​exclusive-north-korean-leaders-used-brazilian-passports-to-apply-for-western-visas-sources-idUSKCN1GB2AY.

Unverified reports indicate that Jang was executed by a pack of hungry dogs. North Korean news claims that executioners starved one hundred twenty dogs for five days. Next, they stripped Jang naked and let the dogs eat him. This is the only method of execution better than the one that Jang’s assistants faced; they were allegedly shot with anti-aircraft guns.

Kim Jong-Il had two daughters, Kim Sol-song (born in 1974) and Kim Yo-jong (born in 1987). Both are working in the government, and the younger Kim has been elevated to a highly visible position after her full brother Kim Jong-Un took power. She accompanied the North Korean athletes to the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics.

North Korea isn’t the only dangerous place that Inoki has conducted his unofficial one-man diplomatic missions. In 1990, before the start of the Persian Gulf War, Inoki traveled to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein to successfully secure the release of 41 Japanese hostages being held by Iraq. He also managed to put on a wrestling event in Iraq during that time, as part of the hostage negotiations. A wrestling event and the release of hostages! Who else could have managed that feat?

The story of Charles Robert Jenkins is an interesting one. He defected to North Korea from his army unit in 1965. His wife was Hitomi Soga, who was kidnapped from Japan by North Koreans in 1978. She was married to Jenkins in 1980 and had two children with him. In 2002, she was permitted to return for a visit after pressure from the Japanese government but she never returned to North Korea. Under pressure from Japan and other countries, the DPRK allowed Jenkins to visit with his wife and kids in Indonesia. Of course, Jenkins shouldn’t have been trusted, because as soon as he landed he asked for political asylum. To make a long story short, he struck a deal with the US Army to serve a thirty-day sentence for desertion and lived with his wife in Sado Island, Japan until his death in December 2017.