Cho Myung-ja ran away from home as a teenager to escape a father who beat her, finding her way to the red light district in a South Korean town that hosts a large U.S. Army garrison.

After she escaped home in the early 1960s, her pimp sold her to one of the brothels allowed by the government to serve American soldiers.

"It was a hard life and we got sick," Cho, 76, said in an interview in her cluttered room in a shack outside Camp Humphreys, a busy U.S. military garrison in the town of Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul.