John M. Glionna

The Blue Dragon Marine Corps Training camp, run by 52-year-old former South Korean military drill sergeant Park Kyung-hoon, is meant to turn boys and girls into men and women. (LA Times Photos)

Korea’s ‘Soft’ Kids Drilled Into Shape

The rain pelting down on him in gray bullets, the teenager in tortoiseshell glasses stands in a muddy field and takes the pain like ... well, like a boy.

Teeth clenched, lenses steamed, water streaming down his face, he looks ready to cry. His sneaker comes off in the muck and he reaches down to pick it up, losing step with the 70 other youths performing drills in military formation.

“Are you feeling cold?” the drill instructor yells.

“No!” the boys respond.

“Are you sure you’re not cold?”

“No, not at all!”

“Well, you sure look cold; let me make you sweat.”

Their hair stringy, eyes downcast, they drag themselves zombielike in pursuit of their instructor — the boy in the glasses last of all. It’s the summer camp from hell.

The Blue Dragon Marine Corps Training Camp is the brainchild of Park Kyung-hoon, a 52-year-old former drill sergeant who sees the younger generation as a sorry lot — physically fragile, undisciplined and weak-minded, hunched over their computers playing video games, talking trash to their overworked parents.

But the moms and dads aren’t blameless. They grew up during the lean years following the Korean War, and many overcompensate, giving their children everything they didn’t have. Finally, after years of such pampering, some parents realize their young need discipline in order to become better students and more conscientious adults. So they’re sent to Park’s little shop of horrors.

“These days, kids don’t know difficulty,” says Park, a stocky man weighing nearly 105 kilograms. “Everything is convenient — hot water, refrigerators full of food. What they lack is a sense of caring for each other, starting with their own parents.”

Unlike similar camps in the US, where such tough treatment is usually reserved for kids with drug problems or those in trouble with the law, South Korea’s kiddie boot camps are a rod not spared from the average child.

Park’s is one of numerous camps that have sprung up in South Korea in the past decade. The camps are not monitored by the government, but Park says his venture, opened in 1997 on a lonely stretch of beach and grass on Daebu Island, has been free of major accidents.

The camp, about 80 kilometers from Seoul, attracts 15,000 students aged 7 to 19 each year. They live in military-styled barracks, training in fields or along the beach regardless of the weather. The boys and girls train both separately and together, all of them wearing the green fatigues that give them the appearance of huffing and puffing little soldiers.

The camp, which has no official affiliation to the military, is run by former special operation force members from the South Korean Marine Corps. For the wide-eyed cadets, this might as well be Parris Island, a place where they are awakened before dawn for another day of pain. Some spend as few as three days here. But there’s also a 14-day regimen, for nearly $1,000, that attracts the hard-luck cases — wallflowers and schoolyard bullies, kids addicted to the Internet and those who know no boundaries with parents or anyone else.

The cadets, 7 out of 10 of them boys, show up on a bus — many duped by their parents that they’re heading for a beach break. Then reality hits.

In Park’s eyes, they’re a bunch of slackers — soft clay to be thrust into the hot furnace of physical exercise.

Most groan at camp rules: no cellphones, no computers and no calls home. Not to mention hard exercises, dawn to dusk. Drill instructors barking orders at them, the kids slither along barbed-wire obstacle courses, jump from towers, run with tires dragging behind them, carry boats over their heads and wallow in the mud.

“It’s hard on your body if you’re not used to it,” says 15-year-old Gina Yu, a Korean-Canadian who is in Seoul for the summer. “When you don’t listen, or don’t answer loud enough or fool around, you pay the price. I fainted on the first day when we were doing squat-thrusts.”

She’s miffed at her parents: “I’m frustrated they didn’t warn me. They said I was going someplace to get fit. They didn’t say it was a boot camp.”

The 12 former Marines who make up Park’s staff aren’t afraid to get into a kid’s face. In the crowded mess hall, they run cadets through a drill before they are allowed to dig into their lunch of rice gruel, kimchi and fruit.

“I will become the strongest and coolest kid!” the boys yell, repeating the camp’s mantra. “I thankfully eat this meal!”

One 11-year-old says he was sent to Blue Dragon after he got a bad grade on an important test. Another broke a window in the family’s apartment. “I threw a marble at the couch,” 13-year-old Andre Courchene says. “But I hit the window instead.”

As another boy uses halting English to describe his knee injury, Park hovers nearby like a press agent.

“Speak Korean!” he commands. “Don’t use your clumsy English!”

Sitting alone before his metal mess tray, David Peck says he doesn’t know why his parents dispatched him and his sister here.

“I think this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” he says.

David’s father, a former ROTC officer, says a bit of pain is good for kids.

“I know they didn’t want to go,” Peck Song-ho says. “But you can’t let kids do only what they want to do.”

Some cadets decide they can’t take it anymore. They go over the wall.

Park tells of five boys, ages 12 and 13, who made a break one night after lights out. Dressed in their military fatigues, they ran up some hills and hit the highway.

“Nobody would stop for them,” Park says gleefully as a group of cadets hurries by his office in the rain on another grueling exercise. “They thought they were North Korean spies.”

The boys were later found huddled at a sauna near their hometown and their parents sent them back to camp. Each year, a few cadets demand to go home. Park typically responds by calling their parents for permission. Most tell him no.

Some children buckle under the physical pressure. That’s when Park goes from drill sergeant to camp counselor.

“I explain to them that there are going to be a lot tougher times in life,” he says. “I say, ‘Enjoy your childhood but use it as an opportunity to build character. Embrace the pain.’ ”

He’s talking about the much-dreaded gas mask drill: Cadets sit inside a room filled with red-pepper mist and remove their masks long enough to sing the South Korean national anthem. One kid was so traumatized that he threatened to call the police.

“It was terrible,” says Kim Mi-jin, 17. “I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. My face was scratchy. All I could do was cry.”

But after thinking about it, Kim says she’s glad she did it: “I think I’m learning to be more confident. I realize life isn’t all about me.”

Park has seen transformations in other kids. “They get bolder. Even their voices change,” he says. “On the first day, I might hear 10 voices out of group of 200. By the last, I can hear every last one of them. It’s a thundering chorus.”

Los Angeles Times

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