Last year I was reunited with a childhood friend of mine who I had not seen in five years. His father was in the Army and was stationed in Korea; his family went with him, and he had been living on the military base there for the time past.
He was regaling me with the stories of his adventures in the city the base was near (I can’t remember which one, but I think it was a big one.) Apparently he had been in a youth gang comprised of sons of officers stationed on the base. Every night he and his friends ran around the city, high or drunk nearly all the time, and stole stuff, beat up people who got in their way and generally raised hell. He said that the Korean police “KP’s” could never really do anything to them because they never carried their IDs with them and so they had to let them go, since they were all white or black and clearly were Americans (I can’t remember exactly how he put it but basically the Korean police could get in trouble with the American miitary base for kidnapping if they held Americans against their will.) Thus, they pretty much got away with it all.
I want to know how realistic this story is from anyone here with experience living on a base. I don’t think this guy would lie to me, but his stories did seem rather wild. Any comments?
Well, my father is stationed at Yokosuka in Japan, and while the you have various teenagers there that do the stupid things teenagers do everywhere, there really isn’t any gang element, and the authorities tend to catch the stupid kids who do bad stuff (like my 15 year brother, who got a couple hundred hours of picking up garbage around the base for shoplifting found out :o ) .
Overall, I would feel a lot safer walking around a military base at night than almost anywhere in the US, and would be more afraid of the typical drunken sailors & soldiers, than teenage punks.
Of course, as a 20 year old college student staying in Japan for the summer, I am more likely to be out there drinking with them.
When I went to school here in El Paso, near Ft. Bliss in Texas, there were problems between “gangs” of military dependents fighting “cholo” Mexican-American gangs in the schools. My impression was that these gangs were mostly formed as a response to being picked on by kids who didn’t like “outsiders” (particularly blacks). And the military dependent’s lives were generally separate from the local Spanish speaking kids. A couple of local high schools have had mini-riots from these conflicts in the past.
None were really hardcore gangs, though they did use names, colors, and imagery from well known big city gangs such as Vice Lords, Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, Gangsta’ Disciples, etc. Relatively few military dependents were gang members, and these kids generally didn’t act up on military property, just in and around the off-base civilian schools.
I don’t know about Korea, but since US servicemen can and have been arrested in Japan (by standard Japanese police officers) for getting out of control while drunk, I doubt that their family members would get any special treatment for doing the same.
Also, as a foreigner, not having your ID is grounds all on its own for being detained by the police (until someone can come down to the station with your ID and vouch for you), so I can’t imagine that not carrying ID would be a very successful excuse.
I can’t speak for conditions overseas, but syncrolecyne described the stateside scene pretty well.
About the time I was born, the public schools around Fort Bragg were ordered to desegregate, and performed a mercifully brief excercise in “bussing.” As I understand it, white civillian kids would approch white army brats and urge them to participate in the harassment of the black army brats. The white army brats, not especially interested in seeing their next-door neighbors being attacked by outsiders, ganged together with the black kids instead. The abortive attempts at racially-motivated warfare quickly became army vs. civilian riots.
In all of my years of living on-base, the post schools were pretty much set aside for the army brats, even if they were administered and staffed by the local school districts.
I grew up on or near military bases in Germany and several times I was picked up by the German police for doing stupid stuff off base. Even though I was in violation of German laws and I could have been prosecuted by the German authorities they generally have agreements to turn offenders over to the base military police. The worst part is that not only do you get in trouble your parent who is serving also gets in trouble from his superiors. I generally didn’t mind being in trouble and having to do community service on the base but I felt bad when my dad also had to do it.
I wouldn’t use the word “gangs”, but kids will be kids. I spent years on a navy base growing up, and we kids did misbehave. There was some sense of invulnerability in that the worst that base security would do was take us home to our parents. We didn’t steal or anything, just plenty of tresspassing, and probably minor vandalism (skating is hard on handrails…). I imagine for anything serious we would have been treated like anyone else on or off base. We just had that buffer of not having to deal with actual cops on the small stuff. Eventually, by 13-14 we had friends among the MPs through mutual music interests.
Frankfurt, Germany had gangs of various stripe among the American dependents. My oldest son (who attended the DOD school) ran with a bunch that had some fairly serious altercations. Some of these groups were formed in defense against the Turks, who had fairly well-organized gangs in Germany to defend themselves against the German gangs of skinheads. The Turks couldn’t (or didn’t) distinguish between a group of white American kids or a group of white German kids.
There were also black gang-like ativities, but I don’t recall hearing of any serious confrontations. I think it was mostly an intimidation thing, rather than a violence thing.
