Army Medic Sacrifices Himself by Falling on IED

This is SGT Shinwoo Kim. He was a Korean-American serving as a medic in the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. He was motivated to enlist after the September 11th attacks. He was deployed to Iraq for the Operation Iraqi Freedom.

It happened on June 28, 2007. SGT Kim and his squadron were in Baghdad, Iraq. A bunch of Iraqi insurgents ambushed, and tossed an IED towards Kim and his squad mates. Knowing that the IED would kill everyone in the squadron, SGT Kim dove over the grenade, sacrificing his life as an attempt to save his buddies. The IED exploded on Kim, and he sustained fatal injuries. A few moments after his family members said their goodbyes (a doctor connected a phone call to Kim’s family), SGT Kim passed away. He was Killed In Action, at a young age of 23. Kim enlisted because he was motivated to fight on the behalf of a country that he wasn’t even born in, and on top of that, he became a medic because he wanted to help people, instead of killing them. From this, I can clearly notice Kim’s devotion and compassion.

Sacrificing your life for the sake of others- that’s something that almost no one would do. However, Kim had enough compassion to do so, and that is what makes me sadder. Kim received accredition from the U.S. Army- he was awarded the Silver Star Medal, given permanent posthumous U.S. citizenship, and there is also a hospital named after him in Camp Humphreys, a U.S. Army Garrison in Pyeongtaek, South Korea.

John Kelly’s defense of Trump was absurd. And he surely knows it.

But Kelly did not even deny Wilson’s basic claim, i.e., that Trump said some variation of “He knew what he was signing up for, but I guess it hurts anyway.”
.. But it’s not clear why Kelly had to go out of his way to suggest that the congresswoman was exploiting Johnson’s death, suggesting for good measure that he was so angry that he walked among the graves of fallen soldiers to cool down, and then launching into a sermon about how basic decency and traditional values are dead. “When I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country,” Kelly said, adding that “women were sacred.”
It’s odd to invoke the “sacredness” of women while defending Trump, whom multiple women have accused of sexual assault and who has repeatedly and very publicly denigrated women in horrifying ways, but Kelly is of course not responsible for Trump’s actions. What is worse is the sleight of hand Kelly used to align Trump culturally and morally with the military and the families of the fallen while casting the congresswoman as belonging to a kind of cultural category that, in the minds of people of Kelly’s generation,
.. which came of age during the country’s searing divisions over Vietnam, is characterized by empty, valueless showboating and doesn’t have sufficient respect for the military and the ultimate sacrifice made by fallen soldiers and their loved ones.
.. Whatever the truth about Wilson’s motives, the decision as to who listened in on the call was a personal one made by the next of kin. And Kelly should respect that. Instead, he helped Trump play the aggrieved party. But in this case, Trump apparently botched the call to a family. He should have known that he might be placed on speakerphone. (When you were a “kid growing up,” surely men took responsibility for their actions, right, John?)