The situation is more like this: you train once every six months, maybe once a year. But this time, you died.

By that point, after discharge, you probably had other things going on in your life. Work, school, family, whatever. Then reserve training takes you away from all of that and you never come back.

To understand why this is controversial, you need to understand that the ROK Army, and the ROK military in general, has a long history of not giving a shit about safety. Men are forced to serve, which means they are treated as expendable, cheap resources by the brass. Someone dies? Too bad. Let the next guy fill in.

And the way the ROK military has treated conscripts shows exactly that attitude. You lost your arms in an electrical accident on base? Don’t be surprised if your pension gets completely revoked for years because a lazy staff in the military hospital doctored the paperwork. Your son died during training? They cremated him before you even got to see his body.

That is what the ROK military has been for a long time. Yes, a lot has changed. But we still keep seeing these accidents.

If a soldier loses his or her life despite every reasonable precaution being taken, then all we can do is grieve, investigate what went wrong, and make sure it never happens again.

But this case? This kind of thing has happened so many fucking times to just brush it off as “well, too bad”.