The US is still supporting slavery
New efforts to stop U.S. troops from visiting prostitutes abroad are
a good step, but let's not whitewash what's happening.
By Preston Jones
September 29, 2004
Near the back of one of my Navy cruise books—roughly analogous to a high school
annual—is a photograph of a girl no older than 15 years old. Index finger on
lower lip, she's scantily clad and posing provocatively. She's a Thai
prostitute. Her controller's identity is unknown, but her customers we can
identify, at least on this occasion. They are American sailors assigned to the
now-defunct U.S.S. Ranger.
According to an anti-pedophilia law passed more than 10 years ago, the bodies
of kids like this were put off-limits to Americans, including military
personnel. But the law was hardly enforceable; and, the occasional token arrest
of pedophile sailors notwithstanding, everyone knew that the chances of getting
caught, let alone busted, were almost zero. The very public photograph in my
cruise book makes the point.
When Navy ships weren't anchored off the coast of Pattaya Beach, the girl's
customers were Australian, Belgian, German, Canadian, Japanese, British, and
American tourists. Whether she knew it or not, she was part of a global
economy. And when American sailors handed money to her (or to her pimp or
mamasan), they were casting a vote in favor of slavery. They were voting in
favor of sex tourism, which has become Thailand's greatest source of external
income. They were sending a message to pimps in the Philippines that they
should disperse girls to the bars, clubs, and brothels near America's military
bases on Okinawa, where Filipinas cannot speak the local languages and where
they expect to get jobs as laundresses and factory workers. Instead, they will
entertain America's young men.
When the Navy guys handed their money over, they were promoting a global
catastrophe. It was therefore both saddening and funny to read the other day
what the commander of 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea had to say. Gen. Leon
LaPorte is concerned that soldiers visiting Asian prostitutes might "be
construed as supporting human trafficking." The words are welcome, but they
echo the language of denial that has been the norm in the military for decades.
Memo to General LaPorte: I went to South Korea with the U.S. Navy. All I heard
about before arriving there was that it had great and inexpensive hookers, many
of whom (I learned) were transported to Pusan from Seoul to accommodate an
aircraft carrier's thousands. That's called trafficking. There's nothing to
"construe."
Trafficking in humans is not new, though it is evil, and in a just world the
leaders who have let it go on decade after decade would be put on trial. The
drunken deeds of America's unwitting freckle-faces in the brothels of Bangkok
are bad enough. The willful refusal among the powerful to acknowledge that each
year American troops pump millions of dollars into Asia's vicious skin trade is
criminal.
Readers might have noticed that anti-Americanism is on the rise. One of the
causes of this in Asia—in Thailand, the Philippines, Korea, and Okinawa—is that
up to now the U.S. military has done almost nothing to prevent or slow the
growth of an industry that treats poor Asian girls (and some boys) as
expendable.
The gist of the September 22 Associated Press article that quotes Gen. LaPorte
is that, soon, U.S. troops overseas may face punishment for visiting
prostitutes. "[W]omen and girls are being forced into prostitution for a
clientele consisting largely of military service members," U.S. Rep. Chris
Smith (R.–N.J.) says. A law prohibiting military personnel overseas from
visiting prostitutes is a good idea, though perhaps I may be forgiven for not
expecting much. If nothing else, when a carrier group pulls into a port, some
6,000 sailors and Marines hit the beach. Melting into the labyrinths of Bangkok
is easy, especially when it's in pimps' interests to help customers remain
undetected.
For the law to be effective, a fundamental shift in the moral culture of the
Navy would be necessary. That may be possible, though the long-standing
eye-winks of high-ranking officers, the open encouragement of senior enlisted
men, and the silence of chaplains have over the years created a sense that, by
right, young men in uniform from Nebraska, Maine, and California should have
easy access to the bodies of girls and young women from Korea, Thailand, and
the Philippines.
Somewhere I have a file of notes I have received from editors at conservative
political magazines, from military officers, and from spokesmen at family
values organizations. The notes make for depressing reading and usually revolve
around a few themes: American troops did not invent prostitution and this kind
of thing exists elsewhere in the world. Boys will be boys. Six months at sea is
a long time. Japanese men are worse. Criticizing the military is un-American.
We don't really care.
So radical feminists (who do care about the prostitutes) and abortion advocates
(who know that children fathered by GIs and born to bar girls are likely to
face grueling discrimination) seize the vacant high ground. This, along with
the general silence of influential people who purport to care about families
and the nation's moral fiber, makes it all the easier for the mainstream to
ignore or to minimize the experiences of the bar and brothel girls. And the
medics still pass out condoms while the generals and admirals speak in
euphemisms.
But many people in Asia, who would like America's Christians to have a little
decency, are perplexed by talk about the U.S. as a "city on a hill." In Iraq we
promote democracy. In ports-of-call on the way home from Iraq we toss our coins
into a system that locks girls in the clutches of pimps in Pattaya Beach,
Bangkok and Phuket. Anti-American feeling grows in Korea and Japan, meanwhile,
and we wonder why.
America has high principles and ideals. Inevitably, its pursuit of these ideals
is imperfect. But some errors are more obvious than others.
I hope it bothers you that for the past several decades American servicemen in
East Asia have horrendously exploited powerless women and girls with the
consent of their superiors.
Preston Jones, who served in the U.S. Navy from 1986 to 1990, teaches at John
Brown University.
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