The Marmot’s Hole

ANOTHER MUST READ!!!!

Came across today John B. Ritch III’s piece “Korea: Troops on the DMZ,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1970. I think some its conclusions are a bit spotty (no way I would have called for a pullback in 1970), and obviously Korea has undergone much transformation over the last 30-plus years, but nonetheless, as you read the article, you’re struck by just how little the discourse surrounding the U.S. military presence in Korea has changed since the piece was written. Read it IN ITS ENTIRETY (if for no other reason that just historical interest): here is just a sample:

The case for phase-out is cogent. Certainly, in numbers, Republic of Korea forces are already more than adequate to provide a sound defense for ROK territory. Exclusive of the 50.000 Korean troops currently in Vietnam, the ROK Army today numbers roughly 600,000 — drawn from a population of 30 million. In the North, with a population of 14 million, Kim Il Sung’s DPRK army comprises about 350,000; and while previously cool relations between Kim and the Chinese Communists may be thawing, as evidenced by Chou En-Lai’s recent visit to Pyongyang, it is highly doubtful that Kim could ever expect Chinese support in initiating hostilities with the South. The now emphasized ROK Homeland Reserve, which trains regularly, brings the total of men in the South able to bear arms at short notice to something over 2 1/2 million — impressive numbers for the defense of part-peninsula smaller than Indiana. And empty numbers: both the ROK Army and the Reserve, fortified by veterans of two wars, have demonstrated real military proficiency. In Vietnam, American military men have had nothing but high praise for the aggressive ROK performance (which carried into the PX, has been the only source of American complaint). At home, the Reserve and the field police have joined in a quick, and even alacritous response in bringing the activities of North Korean infiltrators to a terminal conclusion. The conventional military strength added by the American forces is thus principally subjective: a possible deterrent in the minds of leaders in the North and a source of confidence to leaders in the South.
The costs concomitant to the American presence are considerable, both for the US and Korea. On the American side — in addition to occasional violent death on the DMZ, the drug use problems of G.I.’s dolorously far from home and in areas of easy access, and the hundreds of foredoomed Korean-American marriages (over 90% fail) which annually occur — the expenditure involved in maintaining the US force in Korea, at a state of somewhere between combat readiness and stagnancy, is quite evidently huge. A drippy faucet perhaps in comparison to the gush in Vietnam but in absolute terms a steady and prodigious financial flow. On the Korean side the costs are social. In the American sector north of Seoul and around the US compounds which dot the landscape as far south as Pusan, the jerrybuilt camp-villages provide whatever the G.I.;s will pay for and the resulting scene is one, which might easily rouse the D.A.R. to violent action. Conventional Korean society, embarrassed by the manifest existence of so many “camp followers,” has come to regard them as unpersons, pushing them lower by social ostracism.
The positive community activities of the US forces are relatively minor in effect. There are G.I. sponsored orphanages (generally inefficient, sometimes corrupt, remnants of the immediate post-war period financed now mainly by guilt-money extracted in the pay-line). there is some medical assistance (often for VD), and on occasion engineer aid is provided for Korean construction projects or disaster relief. The results sit light in the balance, and “Korean-American friendship” operates predominantly at the executive level. At the grass-roots level no love is lost, and anti-American sentiment remains latent probably only because the Americans seem the lesser of evils. Surrounded by a build-in insulation of slickie boys business girls, and their own ignorance of things Korean, the large majority of G.I.’s return to the states each year embittered, thinking the Koreans unscrupulous, and disliking Korea.

As I pointed out before, that was written in 1970.