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When the US Army came to our village there was an explosion of sexual violence, and when prostitutes flocked to the village, we welcomed them in the way that I described earlier. What I saw was reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s film, Platoon. The question which I want to pose to the reader is, “What would you be capable of if your life was at risk every day.” During and after an intense, bloody battle, it seemed as if the soldiers had gone insane. This is the most important life lesson that I learned from the war.Įven the sex crimes of some soldiers become momentarily understandable if we assume that they are on the battlefield. That is the reason why we forgave those among us who became communist and we warmly accepted into our village women who had been prostitutes. Actually, I suppose that was pretty much the same experience for all the other villagers. To be blunt, I saw with my own eyes and I know that even the greatest outrages like sexual assault will be tolerated in those circumstances. Why is it that comfort women appeared on the battlefield? Things like Confucian morality vanish in a time of war when people are concerned only with their own survival, but this is not easy for people who have never experienced war to understand. Condoms had once seemed to us like the incarnation of sexual vice, but we learned to stop worrying about that. At my uncle’s house condoms could be procured cheaply so he cut them into long, thin strips with a razor to make rubber strings and set up a business of sewing them into the ankle part of socks. Children filled them up with water and played with them. Whenever it rained you could see condoms flowing everywhere.

The US Army stockpiled condoms in order to protect its men from STDs. The Origins of the US Army’s Korean Comfort Women Professor at Dong-a University, Professor Emeritus at Hiroshima University The Origins of the US Army’s Korean Comfort Women (3)