REFLECTIONS

How did George C. Schreiber, a twenty-five--year-old second lieutenant, get caught up in a series of events that would ultimately involve the governor of the state of Illinois, the attorney general of the state of Illinois, the president of the United States, the judge advocate general of the Air Force, the chief of staff of the Air Force, the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. senators and congressmen, major newspapers, and thousands of people in his home state of Illinois? This same young officer had been a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher and a village recreational director employed by the Board of Education, District 95 in Brookfield, Illinois, until June of 1951, when he enlisted in the United States Air Force as a staff sergeant assigned to Officer Candidate School at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. Upon graduation and receipt of his commission as a second lieutenant, he was assigned to Air Police School at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, from which he graduated in March of 1952. In August, he was sent to Korea to be the officer in charge of an Air Police guard unit at the 543rd Ammunition Supply Squadron located near Pusan, South Korea. Within a year, he was to stand convicted by a general court-martial of premeditated murder.

It all made no sense to me then, and now, almost 57 years later, it begins to become clear. Both Schreiber and I were really pawns in a power game among ambitious and vindictive men, eager to please those whom they felt could advance their military careers. The alleged murder by Schreiber was, in my opinion, the result of a young airman's indifferent and poorly conceived action,. This action resulted in the death of a man whom no one knew and who ultimately would be described as an Oriental male with no known name and no family to ever come forward and claim his remains — a man whom some clever assistant staff judge advocate would, for the purposes of the military justice system, call "Bang Soon Kil."

When Airman Thomas Kinder came home to the United States, he had pangs of conscience that he had taken the life of an unknown Oriental man in the course of his service as an Air Police guard in South Korea. He confided his troubles in his mother, who in turn communicated her son's story to the Office of the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force. The result was a reopened investigation into the events leading up to the killing by Kinder and his conviction by a military court for the murder, as well as the arrest and trial of Lieutenant George C. Schreiber and the attempted arrest and prosecution of former Airman First Class Robert W. Toth.

The distance of time, experience, and a studied revisit of the facts and events lead me to see more clearly what was not visible or otherwise discernable to me as a twenty-three-year-old Air Force lawyer in South Korea in 1953. This story has haunted my thoughts ever since, and this effort to revisit and tell the story is a vindication of conscience on my part — the result of a late-life effort to understand what happened that year in the war-ravaged country of South Korea.

Some of the events, which I now better understand, have become clarified by the tempering of my understanding of human nature after almost sixty years of being a lawyer and by the process of maturation. These are the stories of several good and patriotic men who felt they were doing their respective duties to God and country. The victims were a couple of otherwise dedicated but naive and trusting young men who happened to be fellow officers at a time and place that shaped their characters and lives. George Schreiber was one, and I was the other. We were both victims in our own ways.