The Preface 2007

Korean Mother and Daughter

Seasons in the Kingdom is set at the vanished military compound of Ascom City and the village of Sin-Chon, which grew out of the rubble of the Japanese defeat at the end of the Pacific War and the American occupation that followed. The real location of Ascom City, also known as Ashcan City, can only be found on old military maps, and Sin-Chon lives only in the memories of those that trespassed there, creating a place that is both metaphoric and real. As Matthew Arnold succinctly wrote and fitting for a view of Sin-Chon, or any Korean camptown; it was a place “hovering between two worlds, one dead, the other struggling to be born.” 
      Seasons in the Kingdom tells part of this story of the camptown world at its most intimate level. It is told with as much unvarnished veracity that conscience could afford it. Because, beyond the experiences depicted in this story, this story belongs to the over seven million Americans who served in Korea since 1950, and to countless millions of people of Korean origin who knew us as young men, and who may know us still.

       During the decades after the Korean War, 1950-53, South Korea was economically almost non-existent and struggled to lift itself out of the chaos of a civil war that left the nation divided, the result of Russian and U.S. treaties at the end of the Pacific War. As an uneasy peace settled upon the peninsula, the South Koreans saw the opportunity American wealth could give them in their effort to survive, either as servants, partners, or prostitutes, or in almost any activity that could result in revenue. These camptowns were mini-societies that became the nexus between the ambitious and needy Koreans as they fought for their survival, and, also, the camptowns were the narrow expression of American pop culture which manifest the riches the GI possessed in his billfold. This blending of cultures resulted in a unique social and economic circumstance not entirely Korean, and only partly American. From this Petri dish of the Korean camptowns, frigid in the winter and sweltering hot in the summer, the Koreans and the Americans began to know one another, for better or for worse. These villages became the mixing pot where we developed friendships; learned about a foreign culture; intermarried into Korean families; and brought into the world a new cross-cultural and inter-racial generation. As this marriage of cultures continues to this day as Korea’s resonance within America is deeply felt, enriching us as a nation, and connecting us to Asia and the Korean peninsula in the wider story of our American heritage.

VD Card, Korean Women working as prostitutes were required to carry one,
even though prostitution in Korea was illegal.

Back side of the VD Card, indicating the number of times seen at
 the clinic to check for VD. If the woman had not recently been checked,
she could be detained by the police.

SinChon alleyway, 2008

      Like all camptowns, Sin-Chon was an inconsequential Sodom appended to the arse of America’s military Gomorrah. Covering not more than ten acres, clubs, alleyways, and clusters of houses made up the village. Sin-Chon’s milieu was cheap, carnival-like, blunt, unforgiving, and it offered no apologies. Explicitly sexual and mercenary, exhausted and tawdry, Sin-Chon was affectionately known as Candyland. It was a village so lacking in charm its place in the memory of its citizens was surely in jeopardy, and they, too, would soon disappear. In Sin-Chon, a GI could find a Korean woman who would care for him in a way no American woman could. Mothering him with great care, she would try to make him comfortable, feed him the best of her cooking, and give him the full ellipse of her sex to please his appetite, and give it without complaint or debate. Older GIs, “lifers” - NCOs and officers, who knew the sexual yield of duty in Korea, were coddled by their Korean doxies. As back alley potentates, virtual Sergeant Sardanapalus’, their personal concubines, some young, some not, were willing to do almost anything for them for the money they paid her each month. Both understood the cycle of village life; when the arrangement was over, the woman would return to the clubs until another GI would pay for small bits of domesticity for an hour, a day, a week, a month, or a season in the kingdom. These women dutifully played out roles in the emotional fantasized worlds of these pedestrian American princes of Taegu, Osan, or Tongduchon, their pockets stuffed with wealth and their PX’s filled with plenty, hoping, too, to escape the club life and be taken to America, the great cornucopia of stuffs and things of this and that - the Great PX. It was a buyer’s market.

Paul Black Photo

       In 1971, the American presence in Korea was cutback from two-to-one combat divisions, from an estimated 60,000 to approximately 38,000 personnel, and recently (2006); the force allocation has been downsized to about 25,000 personnel with further reductions and re-positioning of forces planned. Too, by the early 1970s, as many as six million GIs already saw service in Korea, either as combat ready infantry on the DMZ, in the air force, or in support units throughout the Republic of Korea. Because of the disappearance of the four to seven thousand GI’s at Ascom City around 1970 to 1973, Sin-Chon’s heyday, legitimately infamous for the twenty-five odd years of its ascendancy, was passing into history. Becoming a trifling reflection of its former self as the Americans left for reassignment to Camp Carroll at Waegwan; Camp Humphreys at Pyongtaek; Yongsan in Seoul; and back to the United States. The result for the local economy was devastating, and Sin-Chon’s parasitic society tried to sort out its existence without the flood of American dollars into its pockets. It was an enormous economic shock to the nation.

The Dreamboat, on the main drag, SinChon Village

Notice on the door inside the Dreamboat

       By 1973, the year of Seasons in the Kingdom, the U.S. forces had almost totally abandoned Ascom City to the Korean military that used some of the compounds, but many stood vacant. The lone remaining U.S. units at Ascom were the 249th Military Police Detachment at the Ascom City Jail; and the 239th Military Police Company guarding the empty compound at Camp Market, the largest of the Ascom facilities and the only compound that is still in use (2006). The Koreans who had prospered at Sin-Chon, left in their parallel flight to find their wherewithal in Osan, Pyongtaek, Taegu, Tongduchon, and other camptowns near the Americans. At Sin-Chon, the few remaining GIs continued to supply a modest income for the withering nightclubs, unwittingly keeping the village alive by pouring money and black-market merchandise into a dying society starving for liquid assets and modern icons, whether it was Jack Daniel’s, Lucky Strikes, Taster’s Choice, or Westinghouse. But it was all ephemeral, as Sin-Chon was destined to exhaust itself and to fade away. Its insular world was in limbo, its future not yet determined, and its history still to be written.

The Village of SinChon on the right, and Ascom City on the left.
The Dreamboat is the two story building on the right.

Notice that the Korean Woman is hiding her face, common in GI photos.

       The parallel inward-looking world of the U.S. Army stockade at Ascom City was quietly violent, banal and dull, selfish and self-absorbed in its own arrogant vigor, its transient outcasts waiting for orders to redeploy, having been left behind and isolated in their small camp. This is the story of that time; a time when Korean villages were still groping out of their poverty; a time when the U.S. was re-considering its role in Asia in the final years of the Viet Nam War; and a time when young American men were bitter, bored, racially charged, cynical and callous, often, for no apparent reason except for their ability to exercise their brutality and will over the weak or disadvantaged. Considering the number of American military men in Asia since Admiral Perry’s Black Ships dropped anchor off the coast of Japan in 1853, to 1898 when the Philippines was seized from Spain by the U.S., and later, during the conflicts of the 20th Century in Siberia, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Korea, and miscellaneous spots in between, the relationship of American servicemen with this foreign world began, and sometimes ended, with the bars, brothels, and prostitutes attracted to their wealth - real or imagined. In Korea, this was definitely the story in the post-war reconstruction years of the 1950s and 1970s, when camptowns - kijich’on, formed near U.S. camps.

 

Main street entering SinChon, circa 1968

Main Street entering SinChon, 2008

      













Also, compounding the lives of those in the military at that time had been a policy initiated by the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1960s. That policy lowered induction standards to help support the need for bodies in the draft and brought into the military hundreds of thousands of young white, black, and Hispanic men who would have not passed induction standards because of their poor educational background or their lack of intellectual fitness. Young black men were especially victimized by this policy and filled allocation needs for infantryman, and they were shipped to Southeast Asia to fight what many have seen as the black American’s war because of the disproportionate percentage of black Americans in combat units compared to their representative proportions in U.S. society at the time. Rebelling against social injustice, real or not, the young blacks and Hispanics swept up in the draft many times struck out ineffectively against any type of military leadership which was more often than not viewed as representing white authority, usually resulting in confinement in the local stockade. The poor white men, and whites in general, had no social banner or civil rights issue to follow or to arouse their unity, and drifted through the military to be either killed in Viet Nam, or until their 2-3 years of service elapsed; they were a forgotten and unrecognized tide of young men whose lives were forever changed by the times in which we lived.

SinChon alleyway, 2008



SinChon alleyway, 2008

       The story of this transient dominion of diminishing returns of the small military prison and the surrounding village is viewed through the experiences of Mike and Songhi. Mike’s a young American MP assigned to the stockade at Ascom City, and Songhi is a Korean woman living in the village. Their feelings and thoughts and the portrayal of the place are true recollection and prove to be more a memoir of camptown life shared by many, than the biography of any one man or woman. Like innumerable and untold stories of those who lived in Korean camptowns, the truth of Mike and Songhi’s world still touches uncounted lives shaped by their seasons in the kingdom.




Village 1974, near Ascom City

       Mike and Songhi possessed modest dreams for which they fought in a world of sexual slavery, violence and degradation of the human spirit, and in a place that seemed to hover “between two worlds, one dead, the other struggling to be born.” In their time, Mike and Songhi contested the grip of the mamasans who controlled the village girls used by the GIs for their pleasure; and they sought to understand the desires within their hearts. As the veneer of the camptown is revealed, Mike’s interaction with the village women assumes profound consequences as they strive to value what one wants from the other as ambition weighs heavily upon them all, and ultimately, how the facts of this story came to be and where they happened. That is the story of their lives in Seasons in the Kingdom.

Tim Norris, 2007




Ascom City Panorama. Stockade front and center in the photo.