베트남전쟁기 PX와 군표의 정치경제학

Abstract

Examined in this article are U.S. PX(Post Exchange) Stores which were run by the U.S. Army since the second World War wherever U.S. troops were stationed, as well as the Military Payment Certificates(MPC) which were used to operate them. The focus of this article is to determine how such stores and certificates affected the economy and society of states where U.S. troops were stationed, and for that purpose a historic event that occurred during the Vietnam war will be preliminarily discussed.<BR> U.S.’ MPC was only designed to be officially used in PX stores, but in reality they circulated in the vicinity of U.S. Army bases as ‘special currency.’ It served as a basis which formed the so-called ‘Army Base towns’ and several black markets, and was even given to soldiers as payment.<BR> In this article, the historical origin of the PX store and MPC are first examined, as well as how they were used as payment to Korean soldiers for their tours in a foreign country (in this case, Vietnam). Understanding of such history would enable us to see the nature of wartime economy which thrived on U.S. PX stores, MPC and the black market. Such economy could also be labeled as “PX Economy,” in which U.S. and Korean soldiers each played their part.<BR> Secondly, also examined here in such context is the nature of the ‘MPC Reform’ that took place in 1969 in both Korea and Vietnam, alongside a fraudulent act committed by a Korean soldier serving at the Maengho Division within the Korean Army Headquarters in Vietnam, as the incident is documented with details in a MAC-V(U.S. Army Headquarters in Vietnam) report filed by the Inspector General. Hopefully this incident would shed some light on how the “in-the-middle” position that had been initially maintained by the Korean troops, from a country that shared with Vietnam the experience of escaping Colonialism and then also going through the horror of being a war-stricken divided country, later changed due to implications of the Korean-U.S. Alliance, and a ‘crusade’ campaign against Communism.