“Soldier to Sojourner: The Journal” is my impression of North Asia in the 1970s. I spent over a year as an officer in the U.S. Army in South Korea
and close to two years traveling throughout Asia, first as a backpacker and later as a Hippie (yippee-ki-yay).
This Journal is a companion piece to my photographic book, surprisingly also called “Soldier to Sojourner: The Photographs” (Two books for the price of two books. Such a deal!)
I have documented a time, the 1970s, before the all-pervading Western culture (sex, drugs, and rock and roll in Levi’s) and The Economic Miracle changed Asia irrevocably.
The book is written from a soldier (At Ease) and traveler (Sojourner for Stupids) viewpoint.
Each day in my journey brought new enchantments, incredible beauty, sordid ugliness, joy, and suffering that I tried to capture in words.
The Asia of Conrad and Maughan is gone, and the war-torn Asia of Vietnam will also pass.
This is my vision of Asia, a bright shining light from a galaxy far far away that has already disappeared.
Chapter 1: “Ask Not What the Army Can Do For You, But What You Can Do For the Army” “YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW, YOU’LL NEVER GET RICH, YOU SON OF A BITCH, YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW” - Army Bootcamp Marching song My assignment was ASCOM Depot, a huge sprawling installation with the standard barracks, mess hall, and recreation area. We also had a general hospital, a recycle-yard, a nondenominational church, and a prison. There were eight gates that connected us to the Korean countryside of rice fields; it fronted a dirty cinderblock and rusted sheet-metal village called Bup Yong (the Ville). We had around a hundred and fifty officers and 1000 enlisted men, and nine hundred local Korean workers. The Korean workers maintained all our heavy-duty road equipment, did various infra-structure jobs such as paving, plumbing, and electrical work, and generally kept the place running. ASCOM Quonset Barracks: The Army version of Levittown 8 I lived in a large, corrugated sheet metal up-turned ark called a Quonset hut. The EMs (Enlisted soldiers) also lived in Quonset huts but had a dormitory-style living, rows of beds with a personal footlocker at the base of the bed, and one huge bathroom. The officers and high-ranking sergeants had individual rooms that were partitioned off on either side of the hut, complete with a small bathroom and, thank you, God, for a space-heater that kept me warm through the cold Korean winter and served as a stove to have my lunchtime ramen, cooked on top. I made my room quite cozy, with a record player, bookcase, and minibar. I covered my walls with Korean and American posters, original hand-painted comic book artwork, and some of my blown-up photographs of Korea. After a few months, I even bought a small black and white TV to watch Armed Forces Network Programs and Korean-language soap operas, and variety shows. The nice thing about this room was that you could also bring Korean girlfriends here. Although they were supposed to leave by the midnight curfew, nobody enforced that rule. Duties “Young soldier, in order to get ahead, you need to clean the head first”: “Fatherly” advice from the Top Sergeant to a new recruit. Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” This song gives a whole different etymology for the word head “What I did in the War” was as follows: I arrived in Korea expecting to go right into the trenches. We were the expendable buffer between North and South Korea, and we were in a state of preparedness for renewed invasion from the belligerent North. But like previous experiences in the Army, it was “hurry up and wait.” ASCOM Depot didn’t have a job for me, and after two weeks of daily donning a freshly starched set of fatigues (all dressed up with nowhere to go) and picking my nose, the command saw my true potential (a really low bar to excel at!). I would escort a USO show for a month, introducing the group and arranging bus schedules and performance venues, and generally keeping the band sober and drug-free for their performances. I learned how the USO worked, and they were great, bringing a slice of American Pie to lonely soldiers in boondock installations. 9 I was escorting a Christian Country Rock group from Nashville: The Gene Cotton Band. They were great musicians, very professional and businesslike, keeping on schedule and effortlessly working with the limited technical staff at these bases for electrical and lighting hookups for their shows. They had the right mix of country humor, familiar standby songs, and heartfelt delivery. It also didn’t hurt that they had a wholesomely beautiful blond as their lead singer. The GI audience loved them and kept screaming for encores, which they obliged, thankfully. I wasn’t familiar with this kind of music, but for an hour and a half, they brought God, mom, and apple pie to a homesick audience, and who wouldn’t like this. I got to see a hell of a lot of Korea, driving through snow-covered rice fields, endless blocks of drab concrete houses, dozens of muddy-lined little villages, and every out-of-the-way Army post throughout the Republic. We traveled in a Greyhound-like tour bus during the day, arriving at a forlorn little base, setting up, performing, and breaking down the equipment. Then we drove for a few hours to a small but clean hotel for the night. Gene Cotton also managed the group, getting this gig as a chance to secure funding for an ambitious concert tour in the American South that he had planned this coming spring. He was also a Nashville veteran, adept at working the ins and outs of the music business for over ten years. I did my “Here’s Johnny” before every concert and worked with base commanders to handle any crowd rowdiness. The USO picked performance groups that ran the gamut from honkey-tonk Rock and Roll to Soul music. Once, we shared a hotel with a black R&B Soul group just starting their tour. I got to talk to the lead singer of this group and asked him how he liked performing here. With a straight face, he told me, “This is a very hip country. Where else would you have a capital city named “Soul.” After the USO gig ended, I went back, and they gave me another job commensurate with their expectations of me (they lowered the bar even further!). I would be the director of the Army Recycle Yard (in other words, junkyard). I had a staff of about twenty-five GIs and 800 hundred Korean workers, who sorted, stored, and repaired everything that was overstocked, damaged, obsolete, or generally not wanted by the US Army. This sounded like a cushy “Mr. Roberts” assignment (“Well, I’ll water the palm, and then I’m done for the day”), but unfortunately, it was one of the most dangerous jobs in South Korea. The last director, a captain, his first sergeant, and 10 five enlisted men were convicted of black marketeering, and a few were jailed right here in ASCOM Depot. The South Koreans were still recovering from the war, and they could use most of the equipment, tools, and electronics that we were throwing away. One of our GIs was even caught trying to drive a large earthmover out of the junkyard to sell to a Korean construction company. Then the Korean workers got really slick: they took what they wanted, tractors, backhoes, and electronic equipment, and gave it to their business cronies for twenty-nine days, with the proviso that it comes back to the depot in time for the monthly inventory. This went un-policed because the Army was always doing road and communications work outside of the depot daily. If I needed an earthmover for a project, it would be brought back the next day with no one the wiser that it had been used by a Korean apartment-building contractor for the last month. We tried to get a handle on this business, but with hundreds of pieces of equipment going out daily, it was a losing battle. On the positive side, they did maintain the equipment, which would have deteriorated and been useless if left sitting unused around our depot. I managed to keep my hands clean, and as long as the assignments I gave the workers were accomplished, I turned a blind eye to their “arrangements”. I concentrated on my soldiers and tried to counsel my men from getting into situations where the only way to pay back Korean loan sharks was to steal our equipment and sell it on the Black Market. I warned them of the consequences: jail time and how a third of the previous soldiers were in jail because of this. I kept an open door policy to encourage them to talk about their problems with me. However, everyone looked away when an EM would buy at the PX American whiskey, cigarettes, and electronics for hundreds of US dollars each payday (twice or three times more than they made in a typical month) to sell on spec to the local economy. The standing joke was the day after payday, the shelves of the PX would be bare of radios, record players, and black-and-white TVs. The only items left were dozens of color TVs. Why? Because the South Koreans didn’t have the color bandwidths in place to watch color TV, only the Armed Forces Television Network had the color capability. My duties took me over all of Korea, checking equipment readiness and assessing damaged equip