US Forces OK in ROK-for Now

March 02, 2010

By Ben Hancock

When he finally did arrive in 1998, Reeder says of his peers: ‘Pretty much most of them were like, “I’m in Korea for a year and I hate it.”‘ He explains that this kind of mentality was responsible for much of the USFK’s disciplinary problems (although he adds that these are his personal views, not the official stance of the military or USO).

Reeder, who retired in 2009 at the rank of Sgt. First Class, reminds me that this was pre-9/11 and that before Iraq and Afghanistan, Korea was the primary forward-deployed post. This meant troops were in for a year of high-intensity training without their families.

Josh Stanton, a former Judge Advocate General defence attorney who served in Korea for four years and now lives in Washington, has similar memories. Though he volunteered for duty and extended twice, ‘I was definitely a rarity,’ he says. ‘Most of the people were there on one-year tours and they were counting the days.’

Stanton, who still monitors Korean affairs closely and runs the blog One Free Korea, says he enjoyed his time in Korea overall. ‘But I also tried really hard to learn Korean,’ something that’s not worth doing if you’re only going to be in the country for a year, he adds. Stanton also says South Koreans treated the US soldiers ‘at best like a public utility and at worst like a terrible occupier…that was terrible for our morale.’

Stanton left Korea in 2003, about the time Reeder says things really began to change. After the Highway 56 accident, the military put greater emphasis on training troops to be ‘a soldier and a diplomat,’ he recalls. In 2008, the first phase of tour normalization began.

Monahan has also witnessed a change in the last ten years, as Asia has become a more significant area of interest. He says his students are ‘highly-motivated’ and that many of them volunteered for duty in South Korea.

Air Force Maj. Teddy Su, a 33-year-old radiologist at Osan from California, volunteered for Korea duty and arrived here in July 2009. We meet at the USO lounge, where he and a dozen other service members are watching the Saints pound the Colts in the Superbowl. Su calls the opportunity to live and travel in Asia ‘an experience I didn’t want to pass up,’ but acknowledges that he’s not married and has no children.
By the time consolidation and troop normalization is completed toward the end of this decade, the USFK expects about 14,250 military families to be living in 5 enclaves around South Korea. The Yongsan Garrison in central Seoul will be closed and most of its troops moved to Pyeongtaek, about 80 kilometres south of the capital, into an expanded Camp Humphreys. (The city has plans to turn the 600-acre Yongsan lot, which is about the size of New York’s Central Park, into a giant green space.)

So far under the relocation, the USFK has returned over 12,800 acres of land to South Korean control, and has been granted 912 acres chosen by the Korean government for Humphreys. The end-goal is to increase both readiness and efficiency and to create a less intrusive presence.

Oten is confident the plan will achieve this, but concedes that the Humphreys expansion has met some opposition from area residents who were forced off the land. ‘Nobody wants to leave their home,’ he says.

Stanton for his part is concerned that the reforms will give a ‘permanence’ to US basing in South Korea that may not be positive. ‘The presence of tens of thousands of foreigners on your soil is always going to be an irritant,’ he says, particularly in South Korea because it has a ‘very xenophobic streak.’ And while he acknowledges that accompanied tours may improve troop morale and lead to other benefits, he also says that it puts thousands of US civilians within North Korean missile range.

South Korean Choi Jong-ho served with US soldiers in the Korean Augmentation to the United States Army (KATUSA)–a unit that acts as a sort of cultural bridge–from 2004-06. Though he is confident in the ROK military’s ability to fight North Korea and win, he says it cannot ‘contain’ the North the way the US military can.

‘I think [US troops] have to be here, absolutely,’ he says. ‘Though maybe not in 20 or 30 years.’