UC Berkeley

As the largest contingent of Americans in Korea, the US military played an

essential role in the cold war objectives of both containment and integration. The GIs

represented more than "hard power" expressions of the American military might, as they

became "soft power" ambassadors of the US. For many young American GIs, Korea was

the "first strange place" they encountered outside of the United States and their

experiences in this cold war frontier transformed Korea, the United States, and

themselves. This study focuses on the "soft power" wielded by the GIs in their

interactions with Koreans on a distinctly militarized cultural landscape in Korea. The

American military installations and their camptown communities constituted an

"intimate" cold war borderland between the United States and South Korea. Camps

occupied hearts of cities and bordered farm communities. New cities and towns grew

around foreign installations, and the guests and the hosts constantly negotiated over the

impacts of the built environments. Camptowns served as extensions of the military camps

as well as literal and symbolic buffers between the foreign military and the greater Korea.

Although located on the peripheral-edge of Korean society, marginalized as a place of

"dispensable" people, violent clashes, and sexual exploitations, camptowns also

represented an indispensable-edge for postwar Korea. Camps and camptowns presented

opportunities of employment and foreign currency earnings for the economic

development, as well as important locus of desired American culture. Moreover, these

spaces came to be an important "origin" place for transpacific migration for many

Koreans. The ways in which the GIs interacted with Koreans in this intimate borderland,

therefore, produced both cold war integration as well as an "imperfect" imperialism. This

study from the "ground-up" of Koreans and GIs, and of the ramifications and living

legacies of these landscapes, brings together a social and policy history of the greater US-

Korea relations.