A dirty reminder of home

The title of a frontpage article from the 17 February 2010 Phnom Penh Post seems innocuous enough: "US warship in Sihanoukville". Naturally, the article is full of references to joint maneuvers and navy training exercises and whatnot, but it fails to mention that the appearance of a US warship also means the arrival of the 7,500 sailors and soldiers.

Having grown up in Portland, Oregon, the home of the fabled Rose Festival, I know what the dramatic appearance of several thousand sailors means for the level of prostitution in the innocent and welcoming host city. It's the same every year. Prostitutes from as far away as Maine, Canada, not to mention Mexico eagerly await the docking of several warships in the Port of Portland, because this entails not only many customers but perhaps a slightly more "escort-oriented" slant to their normal occupation. Prostitutes become "companions" to the lonely sailors and accompany them to parties, dinners, and on whatever drunken escapades are typical of the Rose Festival. This is usually matched with a resigned grumbling on the part of Portland residents and their casual avoidance of a few choice areas of the city.

Now, with the prostitution scene being what it is in Cambodia, one can only imagine the scale of things when a fat juicy warship docks in a town that is already rife with prostitution and, to beat, is only 10 hours away from almost every part of the country. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Vietnamese prostitutes weren't getting in on some of the action.

Although I am vaguely curious, professionally speaking of course, about what exactly this looks like on the surface in the town of Sihanoukville, I don't think I'll be able to muster the time and courage to make my way down there. And indeed, I'm sure there are plenty of good-willed masters students busy lapping up the naughty details as I write this, which I can then pick through in a most academic way down the road. I can, however, make one rather anecdotal observation from my ivory tower in Phnom Penh, namely that the number of meandering prostitutes populating the capital seems to be at a minimum. My interpreter says the profit ratio on sailors is probably 10-to-1, which does seem to be a sizable enough incentive to uproot from their usual haunts and get in a crowded taxi down to the coast. I imagine those taxi drivers are having a good time and are already gearing up for some unfair price increases for the Sihanoukville-Phnom Penh stretch when they hear about the departure of our friendly neighborhood American sailors.