In 1971, the Nixon Doctrine reduced the number of military personnel in South Korea by 20,000. South Korea was considered a hardship assignment, and most uniformed personnel stayed just a year (and still do today). Though United States Forces Korea was focused on defending against the Communist North, it backed successive autocratic regimes in the South. There were fatal crackdowns on student and labor activists, and anyone even remotely left-wing. In 1980, President Chun Doo-hwan oversaw the slaughter of protesters advocating democratic reforms in the southwestern city of Gwangju. The Carter administration acknowledged South Korea’s “need to maintain law and order, if absolutely necessary by reinforcing the police with the army.” Just a few years later, though, after North Korea tried to assassinate Chun, the Americans restrained him from retaliating against Pyongyang.

Beginning in the late 1980s, South Korea fitfully transitioned into a democracy and became known for its “economic miracle.” A strengthened civil society brought forth the concerns of oppressed groups, including gijichon women. In 1992, an American soldier killed a sex worker named Yun Geum-i, and in 2002, an American military vehicle ran over two 14-year-old schoolgirls, Shin Hyo-soon and Shim Mi-sun, killing them. These and other crimes provoked large-scale protests throughout the country and, in 2003, prompted the newly elected president, Roh Moo-hyun, to negotiate the long-discussed consolidation of American troops within the confines of Camp Humphreys. The Americans, meanwhile, were eager to move soldiers and matériel to an updated facility farther away from the Demilitarized Zone.

For some residents of western Pyeongtaek, consolidation translated into another enormous disruption. Choi’s neighbors in the rice-farming village of Daechuri, on the border of Camp Humphreys, were marked for eviction. “There were people in Daechuri who wound up there because they were kicked off their land in 1952,” when K-6 and K-55 were established, Choi said. “These residents didn’t want to move yet again.” They fought back at public hearings and in court, and with pickets and sit-ins. Ten thousand Koreans marched through Pyeongtaek. When the diggers and bulldozers came at them, in 2005 and 2006, they tied themselves to roofs and fences and took fists and bamboo poles to the metal batons and shields and helmets of the South Korean riot police. It was no match. Hundreds of protesters were arrested, and the land was razed. The police filled irrigation ditches with concrete to prevent further cultivation.

Camp Humphreys is in one of the last agricultural sections of Pyeongtaek, a city whose population now exceeds half a million and is growing fast. More than a decade after what some people remember as the Daechuri War, the new Humphreys bears no obvious scars from the confrontation. As the headquarters of United States Forces Korea, it is at once larger and less conspicuous than its predecessor in megalopolitan Seoul. “Goodbye, Yongsan. Now it’s the Pyeongtaek era,” Korean news outlets have begun to proclaim. (The Yongsan Garrison is slated to become a public park once the Americans finish evacuating and the land is remediated, which could take decades.)