Wasn't shocked by this, I've heard about it from folks before. In fact, I was told by a Army medical officer that when he was in Korea (a few years ago), he told Soldiers in his BN that they were "better off" having sex with Korean prostitutes than female soldiers on the base, because the prostitutes had a overall lower percentage of STDs.

Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases

By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: January 7, 2009
NYT

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has railed for years against the Japanese government’s waffling over how much responsibility it bears for one of the ugliest chapters in its wartime history: the enslavement of women from Korea and elsewhere to work in brothels serving Japan’s imperial army.
Now, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country’s former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops.
“Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military,” one of the women, Kim Ae-ran, 58, said in a recent interview.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/wo...ewanted=1&_r=1

In one of the most incendiary claims, some women say that the American military police and South Korean officials regularly raided clubs from the 1960s through the 1980s looking for women who were thought to be spreading the diseases. They picked out the women using the number tags the women say the brothels forced them to wear so the soldiers could more easily identify their sex partners.
If the military did attempt to medically "screen" prostitutes that soldiers would pick up, is that a bad thing? Sounds like force protection. Soldiers are Soldiers. Some of them choose to buy sex. That was (is) going to happen; might as well try and protect them from disease.

It has been clear for decades that South Korea and the United States military tolerated prostitution near bases, even though selling sex is illegal in South Korea.
Because I don't know, was "purchasing services" from a prostitute illegal for U.S. troops? Was there UCMJ action if they were caught? What is the policy now? I can't imagine it was encouraged, but most certainly tolerated. The allegations end after the 1980s. What changed in the 90s?

Not sure if similar situations have occured in other countries we have bases in; Japan, Germany, Italy, etc. I know that when I was in Iraq, we had a squad in our company that was frequenting a known brothel in a kurdish neighborhood (in our CO AO). I know that the chain of command stepped in and the SL was severly reprimanded, IIRC. Not quite the same thing, since it was a combat zone.