In 1969 I was drafted into the United States Army. Those of you that are old enough will remember that this was at the height of our involvement in Vietnam. I fully expected to find myself carrying an M-16 through the jungles of Southeast Asia. But two things happened that made my military service much more enjoyable and a lot less dangerous. First, I was assigned to an obscure branch of the army known as the Army Security Agency. They chose to train me as a cryptanalyst (that means code breaker, not somebody who counts body bags as one guy in an airport asked me when I told him what my job was). That meant that I fought the war from a desk, and the greatest danger I faced were the headaches from staring at stacks of coded messages all day.

The second break came when I finished my advanced training and got my orders. I was still sure that I was going to Vietnam, but for some reason no one in our class was sent there. Some were assigned to Panama, some to Thailand, and some to Korea, including myself. When the instructor for our class found out that some of us were being assigned to Korea, he just grinned and said, "Korea, the best kept secret in the military." He didn't elaborate, but I hadn't been in Korea long before I knew what he was talking about.

The "secret" was, cheap beer and pussy. And by pussy I'm not talking about blowjobs and quickies from sluts you find on the street corners. Oh no, the Korean girls that hung out in the GI bars were young, cute, and even given the language barrier, fun to be with. Of course, it helped that I had a thing for Asian women before I even set foot in Korea. Later I found out that GIs were having similar epiphanies in Thailand, the Philippines, and several other exotic ports of call, but at that time we thought we were in on our own little "secret" paradise. OK, it may be an exaggeration to call any country where kim chee is the main dish a paradise, but you know what I mean.

Prior to going in the Army, my sex life had been well, lacking, for want of a better word. High school had been a disaster for me, my only sexual experience there was with a couple of girls that everyone was banging, and the time between graduation and my going into the Army wasn't any better. So when I discovered that for the equivalent of $10 (or $5 on a slow night) I could go home with my choice of a dozen or so cute young Oriental dolls, I kind of went overboard. Overboard hell, it seemed like I was determined to screw every girl who said hello to me during my thirteen-month stay in Korea. Rmember, this was 1969, long before AIDS became a concern.

But after a wild first month, I got my libido in check and slowed down in my pursuit of the perfect pussy. I was still going to the bars every night, but now I was able to say no to most of the girls who came over and sat in my lap. It wasn't that I was losing my interest in sex, it was just that I decided it would be better if I limited my activity to once or twice a week. I also wanted to concentrate my attentions on a couple of girls I was becoming attached to, and if I didn't happen to run into them on a given night, I was content to just go back to the barracks to get a good night's sleep.

And that's what I was doing on the night of the experience I want to share with you. After having half a dozen or so beers at my favorite bar, I had decided to head back to base, even though there were still a couple of hours until curfew. I was walking down an alley that was a shortcut back to the base with my head down to shelter myself from a chilly wind, and I was not really paying attention to where I was going. Suddenly, a large figure stepped out of a doorway and planted itelf in front of me. I looked up to see this larger than average Korean man standing there smiling at me. At least it looked like he was smiling; there were no streetlights, so the only illumination was the moonlight. My first thought was that I was about to be mugged, but then I remembered that that kind of thing just didn't happen in that little village.

He launched into a pidgin English sales pitch, and I realized he was just one of the village "slickie boys". That was GI slang for the guys who would approach you on the street with offers of great deals on watches, cameras, or whatever. I had heard rumors that some of them were pimps for very young girls, those too young to work the bars, and when he started talking I thought that's what this guy's game was.

"Hey, GI, you lonely? I got nice girls my house. You come with me? Maybe try something different?"

"Sorry, Charlie, I'm not into little girls." I had picked up the habit somewhere of calling all Korean men 'Charlie'. I kept walking, but he continued to walk along side me and kept up his patter. OK, I thought, let him rattle on, in a couple of minutes I'll be at the base gate and he can't follow me then.

"No, no, I no talk little girls," he protested. "I have special girls, they know lots of things. The know tricks, they better than bar girls. You ever have girl do around the world for you, GI?"

When he said that I stopped. Now he had my attention. I knew I had read about the term 'around the world' in some of the smut I had read as a teenager, but in my beer-addled state I couldn't remember exactly what it was. For a second I though it was oral sex followed my intercourse, but that didn't make sense, because that was pretty ordinary. Just didn't seem like something a slickie boy would be pushing in an alley.

So what was it? It was driving me crazy that I couldn't remember what it was. Then he told me the price, about twice what a normal session with a bargirl would be, so I figured it must be something really special. He was pushing hard, now that he had my attention. "Suzie, she very talented. She make you come lots. Come on, I take you to Suzie. She give you good time"

OK, I thought. I hadn't had sex in a few days, and I was intrigued. What the heck, it would just be another Korean adventure to not tell my grandkids about. So I agreed to go with him, just to satisfy my curiosity, of course.

He led me back to his hootch. Like most of the homes I had been to with the girls from the bars, it consisted of a compound of separate rooms in a U-shape, facing a common area. A stone wall or fence of some kind enclosed the whole thing, with a gate in front. As soon as we walked through the gate to his place, my new buddy "Goodtime Charlie" started yelling at someone in Korean, apparently letting Suzie know she had a customer.

There were a few lanterns hanging around the common area, but that was all the light I could see. Things tended to still be a little on the primitive side in Korea at this time. There was electricity, but either this place didn't have any or they were trying to keep down the electric bill. It never occurred to me until later that there might be another reason Charlie wanted to keep it dark. Charlie led me through the gloom to a room in one corner, and slid open the door. Apparently Suzie had already gone to bed for the night, even though I didn't speak the language, I could recognize sleepy annoyance in her voice as she argued with Charlie. This was really getting strange. Finally he convinced her that it would be worth waking up to service one more GI. He stood in the doorway, and indicated me that I was to give him the money before he would let me go in. That also was unusual. Normally, I gave the money to the girl, who then ran and gave it to her mama-san or pimp.

I gave Charlie the money and he stepped aside and signaled me to enter. I slipped off my shoes and stumbled into the tiny, dark room. The common area had been dim, but Suzie's room was almost totally dark. This was another warning I had that something was weird about Suzie, but I ignored this one also. The first hint was the fact that she had a pimp working in an alley for business. Sometimes it's amazing how dumb men can be when they are thinking with their pricks.