Alex Green
Triangle Reporter
The Texas Rangers were about to score four 11th inning runs to take a 2-0 lead in the American League Championship Series against the Detroit Tigers. The Subzone side of the Lion’s Den buzzed as students unwound after a warm October day that had turned overcast and begun to drop cold, thin drizzle onto Bryan College. An errant pitch hit the Tigers’ batter; reactionary cries erupted from the adjacent table.
Sun Jinn Jun arrived almost on cue with the clamor of the protestors to the baseball action. He didn’t look like a veteran. In fact, it would have been easy to mistake him for a high-schooler visiting Bryan’s campus on a recruiting trip.
Sun Jinn – or Brian, his “other” name that he drew out of a basket at an English-teaching school when he was 7 or 8 – sported a baseball cap: black and yellow, with a “P” on the front for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He didn’t pay attention to the game unfolding in Arlington, Texas.
He was born, he said after a handshake and introduction – Sun Jinn and Brian were equally acceptable – in South Korea, and he moved to the Philippines when he was 9 after his parents accepted positions as missionaries in that country. In the Philippines, he attended a Filipino school, a Chinese school, and he finished at Faith Academy, an English school, in 2007.
After he graduated from Faith Academy, Sun Jinn was sent his mandatory military-service papers from the South Korean government. Every man in South Korea, he explained, has to serve in the military at some point due to conscription laws. He, however, filed to postpone his enrollment to pursue a college education in Korea.
Sun Jinn never heard from any of the Korean schools that he applied to.
“I guess I didn’t get accepted to any of them,” he said, now four years later.
Sun Jinn then turned to the United States. Because of his connections in the church due to his parents’ roles as missionaries, Sun Jinn heard about Bryan College – 8,500 miles away.
Like other college applicants, Sun Jinn applied and waited. Unlike other college hopefuls, he filed for an international education visa and financial aid for an international student. After confirmation that the school had handled the red tape, Sun Jinn trekked to Dayton.
Semesters one through three went much as they do for any college freshman. But in the summer of 2010, Sun Jinn returned to his home country of South Korea, and he wouldn’t return to the U.S. for over a year. Rather than forgo his military obligation for another year to pursue a business degree in Dayton, Sun Jinn bit the bullet and went into the South Korean military.
The Korean military veteran casually revisited his decision.
“A lot of people wait a couple of years before they go,” he said. “Most of the people I went in with were my age.”
But things took a serious turn in Korea shortly after Sun Jinn enlisted.
The notorious mad-man dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il, began to make aggressive movements toward his democratic neighbors to the south and to the free world at-large. On May 26, 2010, a North Korean submarine sank a South Korean navy vessel in waters that had been the subject of decades-long tension.
“We didn’t take it too serious at first,” he said. But as Sun Jinn relaxed on leave, his father called to tell him that his base had called his home to put him on alert.
Sun-Jinn, a logistics filer for his base, was made to wear a gun – out of the norm for non-combat soldiers – and his evening down time was taken away for two weeks or more.
But even then, Sun Jinn didn’t regret his decision.
“I did wonder when it happened, ‘Why now?’” he said of those tense weeks.
But as with his mandatory service, Sun Jinn rode it out and made the best of the hand he had been dealt. The Korean tension fizzled as mounting pressure against North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il rose from the United Nations.
On July 4, 2011 – Independence Day, fittingly – Sun Jinn’s mandatory military service was deemed complete by the South Korean government. He returned to Bryan College in August, just weeks after living and working at a military base 30 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone.
His roommates from 2009 have graduated. No one calls him Brian anymore – no one here knows that story. Sun Jinn is on track to graduate from Bryan with a business degree in 2012. After that, he said he wants to find a job in the United States; if he can’t find one, he hasn’t ruled out going back to South Korea to work for a while. Ultimately, though, he said that he wants to end up on U.S. soil where business careers are easier to find.
On July 4, the Texas Rangers beat the Baltimore Orioles 13-4. They were 46-41 and unlikely to make a second World Series appearance in two years.
But they did. And they weren’t the only ones to make a comeback this fall.