Troops in Korea

Tony’s Hall’s impassioned “Moral Case for Feeding the Enemy” (Commentary, Feb. 12) contains lots of statistics, the most astounding of which is that we have 37,000 of our military in South Korea at an annual cost of $10 billion, protecting that prosperous nation from its impoverished and starving neighbor. It seems to me that our contingent thus frees 37,000 South Koreans to work in factories producing electronics, cars, industrial equipment and the like, much of which is shipped here to exacerbate our already huge balance-of-payments deficit.

If the South Koreans are so worried about invasion, let them build their own forces and guard their own frontier so we can reduce our military presence there to a few attaches at our embassy. Make sense?

STEWART CRAWFORD

Banning