February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
But the five who are not photographed are listed on the site along with their 24 fallen comrades whose photos appear in this report.
The five are Maurice Angland, County Cork; Michael Gannon, County Mayo; Michael Hardiman, County Roscommon; Philip Lynch, County Galway, and William Mills, County Antrim.
McGinn’s efforts to document the story of the Irish Korea dead arose from his interest in the Irish who fought in Vietnam.
McGinn, born in New York but raised and educated in Ireland, served with U.S. army intelligence in Vietnam in 1969-70. He later initiated a website called “Irish on the Wall,” a reference to the Vietnam memorial in Washington D.C.
McGinn’s first inkling of a Korean equivalent to the Vietnam Irish story came from Vicki Curtin of the Washington, D.C.-based Irish Immigration Network. In time, McGinn hooked up with John Leahy, the Kerry native, Korea veteran and Florida resident who has worked since the 1970s to secure posthumous citizenship for the Korean War Irish dead.
The website address is www.irishinkorea.org.