Camp Follower

In most wars, you have a bunch of men far from home, daily scared for their lives and wanting some relief. Enter the wartime prostitute, someone to provide soldiers, sailors, etc., with female companionship.

Not to be confused with a follower who is camp.

Examples of Camp Follower include:

Films

• Not quite the same thing, but some Playboy playmates turn up to entertain the troops in Apocalypse Now. Based on an actual visit.
  • Gets a bit closer to the trope in the Redux version; the playmates' transport breaks down and the characters in the main party offer to fix it... in exchange for some private time with the playmates.
  • Charlie didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat.
• French forces often had something called a BMC (Bordel militaire de campagne) where they would provide 'comfort' for the soldiers. One BMC was even sent to Dien Bien Phu where the women served as nurses and were re-educated by the Viet-Minh.
• American Gangster.
• Full Metal Jacket. She love you long time.
• Cheryl Ladd's character (Deborah Solomon) in Purple Hearts wasn't a prostitute, but a Navy nurse. She provided the romantic interest and motivation to Ken Wahl's character Don Jardian, which led him to volunteering for some dangerous missions just so he could see her.
• In Mediterraneo, a troop of Italian soldiers is sent in a Greek island during World War II. While most of the locals are hidding, a prostitute (played by Vana Barba) stays to offer her services. She will later marry one of the soldier.

Literature

• At the beginning of Sharpe's Rifles, a bunch of drunken redcoats are seen sleeping with some local women who have turned to prostitution. Later in the book, Sharpe has an argument with the Spanish officer he's teamed up with while fondling a prostitute. He doesn't sleep with her.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, Tyrion Lannister enlists the services of a prostitute camp follower, and later smuggles her into the city to be his concubine.
• In Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, the soldiers visit a camp brothel in order to steal women's clothes for the purposes of an Operation Washerwomen. Ironically, the soldiers are all Sweet Polly Olivers anyway, but left most of their clothes at home.
  • They also get advised that if they don't visit the "Solid Doves", people might get suspicious. Sgt Jackrum always brought a book to read.
• Nately has a favorite hooker in Catch-22 with whom he has fallen in love. She is referred to as "Nately's Whore" throughout.
• The ironically-named Chastity eventually becomes one of these in Vile Bodies.
• James Jones' From Here to Eternity has Alma, Prewitt's love interest.
• The short story "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" by Tim O'Brien deals with a Vietnam soldier bringing his girlfriend to 'Nam.
• Gone with the Wind includes a description of the prostitutes that have come pouring into Atlanta with the army, including a wry observation by the town's #1 Bad Woman that she was turned away from volunteering at the hospital because they "didn't want [her] kind of nursing".
• Mollie Bean in The Guns of the South combines this with Sweet Polly Oliver. Note she's based on a real person.
• Gretchen Richter, one of the major characters in the 1632 series is a former camp follower who was rescued and promptly married by one of the time-displaced Americans. Also she's Badass.
• A brothel owned by one of these shows up in the third Codex Alera book, Captain's Fury. Tavi tends to use it just for the bath. After most of the command structure of his Legion's blown up by Canim sorcery, he hires the madam, who's shown to be a keen businesswoman and good with people, as his Tribune Logistica - basically, supply officer.
  • Because of how crafting works, the prostitutes themselves are relatively strong earthrafters (because you can inspire lust with earthcraft ... we don't know either but that's how it works). When Tavi needs to build large defensive emplacements, he drafts the prostitutes.
• In the Sword of Truth, camp followers of all kinds are portrayed as very bad people. The D'Harans target the Imperial Order camp whenever they can, not having any qualms about having denying the Imperial Order any service they can, whether it's that kind of service, or blacksmithing or cleaning or anything else that could give the Imperial Order any advantage.
• The Aubrey-Maturin series is rife with whores. Stephen blames this on the land rather than the sailors.
• In Belisarius Series, after Belisarius recaptures a Persian city his army is crowded with Persian civilians clinging to the Romans for protection. This is Truth in Television; many camp followers in history were simply seeking protection from the other army or from the opportunistic banditry that always comes when war breaks down law and order.
• Nicholette in Seven Men of Gascony. In some ways she is a subversion as she is not only a wine seller rather then a prostitute but she is almost prudish for the circumstances. She is actually married to every one of the soldiers she serviced (one at a time of course until he was killed). The only irregularity was that her first husband was married in a French Old Soldier ritual rather then legally.

Live Action TV

• Marg Helgenberger's character on China Beach.
• A scene in Band of Brothers has one of the soldiers engaging in sex with a French prostitute.
  • Similar to the French in the Real Life section, one episode shows the men liberating a Dutch city - where the people are taking the opportunity to shave and humiliate the women who slept with Germans.
• On Generation Kill, the Marines are approached by two Iraqi gay male prostitutes.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: During the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, Bajoran women were taken to be used as comfort women for Cardassian soldiers.
• What with M*A*S*H being a show about how a military unit deals with war, these tend to show up fairly frequently.

Music

• The song "1917" by David Onley describes a French Hooker with a Heart of Gold consoling shell-shocked young soldiers:

He speaks to me in schoolboy French
Of a soldiers life inside a trench
Of the look of death and the ghastly stench
I do my best to please him

Theater

• Miss Saigon
• There's one of these in Mother Courage and her Children.

Real Life

• Throughout history, "camp followers" would follow armies to sell goods and provide services to the soldiers, which included prostitution.
• Occurred a lot in Vietnam, where it was called "Rest and Recreation" and generally occurred in Bangkok or Hong Kong. Hence the redirect title -- Rest and Procreation.
• Urban Legend claims that the term "hooker" for "prostitute" comes from the "soiled doves" that would follow Union General Joseph Hooker's division during the Civil War. Evidence dates the word to earlier, but Hooker's apparent fondness for hookers may have popularized it.
• Before the king trusted her, French and English soldiers initially thought Joan Of Arc was a prostitute. Why else would she be following the army?
• When British Soldiers were Cloistered in Boston during the Revolutionary War, they often had relations with the local women (and by the time Americans took back the city, a VERY back-end enhancing dress was quite popular)
• Perhaps the darkest Real Life example would be Japanese "Comfort Women" during World War Two. Some were recruited by choice, but many more were tricked into thinking they'd be nurses or cooks. Many were drawn from occupied countries, such as Korea, Okinawa and China, essentially kidnapped to be gangraped by up to 35 soldiers a day. As many as 200,000 women suffered these atrocities. Japanese women who survived were rejected in their own society for being seen as whores and lived difficult, lonely lives. Even today the Japanese government is slow to acknowledge any of this despite pressure from other nations.
• French women who slept with German occupiers were seen as collaborators and had their heads shaved in public. If they didn't take the hint, subsequent sanctions could be more severe.
• The Ancient Greeks being equal-opportunity lovers, there are several instances of armies being delayed on the march because an officer (and in one case, a King of Sparta) had fallen in love with a local boy and refused to leave him behind.
• To prevent this trope, when Clara Barton formed the Red Cross during the American Civil War, she specified that all the women who applied as nurses be "at least 30 and plain-looking."
• In a subversion, most of the shipboard stowaway women in the Royal Navy seem to have been legitimate wives. Love might make a woman endure the life but prostitution did not pay well enough to go to sea just to find jobs, and most prostitutes waited at shore near naval bases.
  • Similarly, in the British Army, a large number of the camp followers were either common-laws or legal wives rather than prostitutes per se and were regarded as in a sense part of the regiment.
• Although these women provided sex and then resulting STD's could decimate an army, many commanders tolerated them since the men needed companionship and more importantly many of the prostitutes would assist in providing medical care to the wounded. Yes medical care. Stop sniggering. Really.
• In eighteenth century armies women would often go foraging, and some commented on how they could be as ruthless as men about such things
• John Bierman in War Without Hate (a history of the North African campaign), implies that one of the reasons that the song Lili Marlene was popular was the ambiguous status of the woman left such things to the imagination. She could on the one hand be the innocent girl back home they liked to think they were fighting for. On the other hand, what the heck was she doing hanging around the barracks gate as the song's words have it?