Yongsan Legacy 1970s black market mania and the 'yobo menace'

The cover of Martin Limon's latest book, "The Line," released this week

By Martin Limon

During the 1970s, GIs used to call America “The Land of the Big PX.” So when we naive young soldiers arrived in “The Land of the Morning Calm” it was disorienting to be suddenly told that instead of being constantly exhorted to buy, buy, buy, we were now being told that we couldn't exercise our God-given right to purchase anything and everything we could afford _ or not afford.

We ran into the 8th United States Army's policy of Ration Control.

In the PX and the Commissary a single GI was allowed to spend only $90 per month (somewhere between $600 and $330 in today's money). Certain items, like Folger's Coffee Crystals, Tang and soluble creamer were restricted by the number of ounces you could buy. More upscale items like stereo sets, televisions, cameras and wristwatches were restricted to purchasing only one per tour. And your company commander would check before you left to make sure you still had them!

Why this totalitarian obsession with GI consumerism? The official reason was that since these items were shipped to Korea at U.S. taxpayer expense and since no sales taxes or other import duties were charged, it would be unfair for a soldier to turn around and sell them at a profit. And since the Korean economy was still recovering from the bludgeoning it took during the Korean War, fledgling local industries needed space to grow without having to compete with imported U.S. products.

That was the stated reason. The real reason, I believe, was different. As I often heard said by dependent American wives and high-ranking U.S. officers alike, the real reason was to keep the “yobos” out of our PX (“yobo” is a term Korean spouses call each other).

Once a GI married a Korean woman she received a dependent ID card and her own 8th Army Ration Control Plate. With that she could purchase the maximum amount of allowed items every month and turn around and sell them on the rapidly growing Korean black market, usually doubling her money. Some items, such as imported scotch or cigarettes, would fetch three or four times what was paid for them.

As a result, U.S. law enforcement _ both the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) and MP investigators _ were put on the black market detail, the purpose of which was to arrest GIs or their wives who were caught red-handed selling restricted items off base.

This is the task I gave to my two fictional characters, George Sueno and Ernie Bascom, in my series of Yongsan Compound-based novels, the most recent of which is “The Line” out this month on Soho Press. But their hearts aren't fully committed to the task of busting people who they see as not exactly criminals. Most of the dependent Korean wives who engaged in black marketing came from poor families and the money they earned was put to purposes such as supporting elderly parents or subsidizing school tuition for a younger sibling or paying a grandmother's medical bills. They weren't exactly jet-setting to the French Riviera.

But in the five tours totaling 10 years I served in Korea I never once saw the 8th Army brass falter or even slow down in their manic quest to stop the black market. In their opinion, the yobo menace had to be stopped. Even to the extent that once a GI and his family members were shipped back to the States, if the Korean wife returned to visit her mother and show off the grandkids, she wasn't allowed even a few dollars ration to purchase anything in the PX. Not baby formula, not diapers, nothing. This despite being a bona fide military dependent with, supposedly, full Commissary and PX privileges.

Meanwhile, the college-aged children of high-ranking officers who flew to Korea to visit their parents during summer break received a full ration. As did Officers' Wives' Club members from Japan on a shopping junket. Even members of some foreign embassies received ration control plates, as did their dependents.

But a Korean GI wife? No ration for her unless 8th Army was forced into it.

During the late 1970s, I was assigned to the strangest duty of my military career. We were given an armband and told to stand at the end of the checkout line at the Yongsan Commissary and write down the names of any dependent wives or GIs purchasing excessive amounts of non-controlled items. Examples were bananas, Spam and frozen oxtail. I felt like a fool. So did most of the other guys on the detail. One of them wrote to his Congressman complaining that he hadn't enlisted in the military in order to save the world from a Spam apocalypse.

Shortly thereafter, the detail was canceled, no explanation given.

Stop the yobos! That was the real impetus behind 8th Army's ration control policy.

Martin Limon is a full-time writer who retired from the army with 20 years of military service, 10 of which he spent in Korea. The latest of his 13 novels is “The Line.” Visit

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