AOH Veterans Report (March 2022)

National: NSTR

State

House of Delegates and Senate were called back into Special Session by our Governor. However, the State does not have a budget as the Senate and House cannot agree on the outlines of a budget including the use of over $14B in budget surplus which the Governor wants to use for a Veterans Retirement Pay tax break, reducing the grocery tax, and instituting a 90day gas tax holiday.

History and Patriotism-Irish in the Military

Korean War

*159 Irishmen sacrificed their lives from 1950-‘53.

*28 of them were American GI’s, the rest part of the Commonwealth Brigade, including the Royal Ulster Rifles.

In a little-known chapter of Korean War history, 27 US Army soldiers and one US Marine – all Irishmen – went to Korea and never came back. They fought and died as US servicemen, but in a strange twist to their tragic stories, they weren’t US citizens. They were Irish immigrants who had legally come to America just years, sometimes months, earlier in hopes of becoming US citizens. They were motivated and courageous and wanted to be Americans more than anything else. Now was their chance.

Along with hundreds of other Irish immigrants, they joined or were drafted into the American military. Fighting for America would bring them one step closer to citizenship, they believed. But it wasn’t that easy.

The laws about becoming a citizen were unclear. Many who returned from the war were told they’d still have to wait five years, just like everyone else, before they could apply for citizenship. It wasn’t fair. They weren’t being recognized for their military service. By the war’s end, however, everything was beginning to change.

In late 1953, Congress passed a law stating that active-duty members of the military who had served in a war, even a non-declared war like the “police action” in Korea, would be granted citizenship in 90 -180 days. But the law wasn’t retroactive. The 28 Irish-born men who had died didn’t qualify. They had sacrificed their lives for America, but their adopted country was refusing to recognize them as US citizens.

John Leahy, an Irishman who had fought in Korea and survived, was furious. In 1976 he began a campaign to bring awareness to his “forgotten” brothers in arms. Twenty-seven years later, in 2003, on a beautiful day in Brooklyn, the 28 men received their posthumous citizenship at the unveiling of an Irish Korean War Memorial at Green-Wood Cemetery. John’s dedication to his fallen comrades had finally paid off.

Before giving his eulogy for the fallen servicemen, Mr. Leahy told the audience, “Today is possibly the proudest day of my life. . . these 28 have crossed home plate are now in a beautiful clubhouse and have a monument of their own.”

The following lines of the Korean Lament by Mark McConnell, an Irish man who also fought in the war:

There’s blood on the hills of Korea,

It’s the blood of the freedom we love,

May our names live in glory forever,

And our souls rest in Heaven above,

And, boy, when you go back to Dublin and Belfast,

When this war is over and done,

Just think of the ones left behind you,