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South Korea Agrees to Station a Hospital Unit in South Vietnam

September 5, 1964

1964-09-05_Box_36_0003
1964-09-05_Box_36_0003
Vietnamese women present South Korean nurses with flower garlands during a ceremony marking the arrival of the South Korean Hospital Unit. (National Archives)

South Vietnam signs an agreement with the Republic of Korea (South Korea) by which the Koreans are to operate a mobile army surgical hospital in South Vietnam. On September 13, 34 officers and 96 enlisted men of the South Korean army deploy to Vietnam to staff the hospital unit. Ten Korean Taekwondo instructors arrive at the same time. The United States is to provide logistics and support for the Korean units.1

1Stanley Robert Larsen and James Lawton Collins, Jr., Allied Participation in Vietnam, Vietnam Studies, (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1985), 121–22; Lee Byeong-cheon, ed., Developmental Dictatorship and the Park Chung-Hee Era: The Shaping of Modernity in the Republic of Korea (Korea: Changbi Publishers Inc., 2003), 249; Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel, The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 409–10.