'My Body Was Not Mine, But the US Military's'

By David Vine, Politico

05 November 15

t night in the Songtan camptown outside Osan Air Base in South Korea, I wandered through streets that were getting louder and more crowded now that the sun had set. As the night progressed, hip-hop boomed out of bars along the main pedestrian mall and from second-floor clubs with neon-lit names like Club Woody’s, Pleasure World, Whisky a-Go-Go and the Hook Up Club. Many of the bars have stages with stripper poles for women to dance to the flash of stage lights and blasting music. In other bars, groups of mostly Filipina women in tight skirts and dresses talked to one another, leaning over the table as they shot pool. Some were chatting with a handful of GIs, young and old. Groups of younger GIs walked together through the red-light-district-meets-pedestrian-mall scene, peering into bars and considering their options. Bright signs for cheap hotels beckoned. Near a small food cart, a sign read, “man only massage prince hotel.”

For anyone in the U.S. military, it would have been a familiar sight. As long as armies have been fighting each other, and long before women were widely seen on the battlefield, female labor has been essential to the everyday operation of most militaries. But women haven’t just washed the laundry, cooked the food and nursed injured troops back to health. Women’s sex work has long been used to help keep male troops happy—or at least happy enough to keep working for the military. Today, commercial sex zones thrive in tandem with many U.S. bases around the world, from Baumholder in Germany to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Many look much the same, filled with liquor stores, fast-food outlets, tattoo parlors, bars and clubs, and prostitution in one form or another.

The problems associated with the sex trade are particularly pronounced in South Korea, where “camptowns” that surround U.S. bases have become deeply entrenched in the country’s economy, politics and culture. Dating to the 1945 U.S. occupation of Korea, when GIs casually bought sex with as little as a cigarette, these camptowns have been at the center of an exploitative and profoundly disturbing sex industry—one that both displays and reinforces the military’s attitudes about men, women, power and dominance. In recent years, exposés and other investigations have shown just how openly prostitution has operated around American bases, leading the U.S. government to ban solicitation in the military and the South Korean government to crack down on the industry. But prostitution has far from disappeared. It has only grown more secretive and creative in its subterfuge. If you want to know more about what’s at the root of the military’s struggles with sexual abuse, look no further than Songtan.

As World War II came to a close, U.S. military leaders in Korea, just like their counterparts in Germany, worried about the interactions between American troops and local women. “Americans act as though Koreans were a conquered nation rather than a liberated people,” wrote the office of the commanding general. The policy became “hands off Korean women”—but this did not include women in brothels, dance halls and those working the streets. Instead, with venereal disease and other communicable infections widespread, the U.S. military government created a VD Control Section that instituted regular inspections and treatment for “entertaining girls.” This category included licensed prostitutes, dancers, “bar girls” and waitresses. Between May 1947 and July 1948, medical personnel examined almost 15,000 women.

U.S. military authorities occupying Korea after the war took over some of the “comfort stations” that had been central to the Japanese war machine since the 19th century. During its conquest of territory across East Asia, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women from Korea, China, Okinawa and rural Japan, and other parts of Asia into sexual slavery, providing soldiers with “royal gifts” from the emperor. With the assistance of Korean officials, U.S. authorities continued the system absent formal slavery, but under conditions of exceedingly limited choice for the women involved.

The arrangements were further formalized after the 1950 outbreak of the Korean War. “The municipal authorities have already issued the approval for establishing UN comfort stations in return for the Allied Forces’ toil,” wrote the Pusan Daily. “In a few days, five stations will be set up in the downtown areas of new and old Masan. The authorities are asking citizens to give much cooperation in coming days.”

After the signing of the 1953 Korea-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty (still the legal foundation for U.S. troops’ access to U.S. and Korean bases), camptowns boomed. In the 1950s alone, 18 new camptowns were created. As the political scientist and camptown expert Katherine Moon explains, they were “virtually colonized space where Korean sovereignty was suspended and replaced by the U.S. military authorities.” The livelihoods of Koreans in the camptowns were almost completely dependent on GIs’ buying power, and sex work was a core part of the camptown economy. The camptowns became “deeply stigmatized twilight zones” known for sex, crime and violence. By 1958, there were an estimated 300,000 sex workers in a country with an entire population of just 22 million. More than half worked in camptowns. In the middle of downtown Seoul, where the Army occupied the 640-acre Yongsan Garrison originally built by Japanese colonizers, the Itaewon neighborhood filled with bars and brothels. GIs named it “Hooker Hill.”

“Cohabitating marriage,” resembling European-style colonial concubinage, also became popular. “Many men have their steadies,” commented one military chaplain. “Some of them own their girls, complete with hooch [small house] and furniture. Before leaving Korea, they sell the package to a man who is just coming in.”

After a military junta seized power in South Korea in a 1961 coup, Korean officials created legally recognized “special districts” for businesses catering to U.S. troops and off-limits to Koreans. American military police could arrest sex workers without health inspection cards, and U.S. doctors treated women with sexually transmitted diseases at detention centers given names such as “the monkey house.” In 1965, 85 percent of GIs surveyed reported having “been with” or “been out with” a prostitute.

Camptowns and prostitution thus became critical parts of a South Korean economy struggling to emerge from the devastation of war. South Korean government documents show male officials strategizing to encourage GIs to spend their money on women in Korea rather than Japan during leave time. Officials offered classes in basic English and etiquette to encourage women to sell themselves more effectively and earn more money. “They urged us to sell as much as possible to the GI’s, praising us as ‘dollar-earning patriots,’” recounts former sex worker Aeran Kim. “Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military.”