When I was originally assigned to the 19th Support Command at Camp Henry, Korea, I received a command sponsored assignment with deferred travel of my dependents. What that meant in normal civilian terms was that my wife and children would be allowed to travel to Korea to live with me, but they would have to travel at a later date when housing became available. Since I had received an apartment in the Sue Song Heights housing complex in Taegu, the travel section at Camp Walker arranged for my dependents to fly over to Korea. Once they arrived in country and got settled in, what do you suppose the next logical step was? Any takers? No? Oh, come on. That was an easy question. What do you do after you have been gone from home for a long period of time on a deployment or something? Okay. After that. After you go out and get drunk with all of your buddies. Go and visit relatives and friends. Right? Sure, you do. Anyway, that’s what we did. We had to go and visit all of my wife’s relatives. Her aunts and uncles and her brothers and sister. You know. Normal shit that relatives do. One of her brothers, I looked forward to going and seeing. That was the older of the two brothers who was about my age. He was pretty cool. The younger one, not so much. With the older brother, I could always drink a few brewskis and talk about the good old times that we hadn’t been having. You know. Guy talk. We’d be doing that while our wives were in the other room, gossiping. You know. Women talk. My wife also had a couple of pretty cool uncles and aunts that I liked to go visit. One lived in the outskirts of Seoul in a really swank part of town. The other one lived up in Chuncheon. My wife’s uncle in Seoul was a high-ranking police officer in the KNP (Korean National Police). His brother had a son who always tried to arm-wrestle me every time he saw me in the hopes of one day beating me. Even after he attained a black belt in tae kwon do, I still remained undefeated. I always tried to explain to him that it’s about arm strength and leverage not martial arts skill. He always liked to point out that I had never attained black belt status in martial arts. And I agreed with him. But I argued that he couldn’t lift 400 pounds of weight, while I could. He thought that if he arm-wrestled me 15 or 20 times in one go, eventually he would beat me. I called that warped logic. If he had the opportunity to try that today, he might succeed. But back then, never. On our very first trip up to Chuncheon and Seoul, we were cruising on the expressway when we overtook a dump truck with an uncovered load of rocks. The rocks on the bed of that dump truck were rather large. There was a long line of cars in the passing Lane, so I had to wait for an opportunity to pass the dump truck. Meanwhile, it seemed as if the dump truck was attempting to hit every pothole and imperfection in the asphalt of the expressway that we were on. I kept thinking, “What in the hell is this sonofabitch trying to do? It seems like that asshole is deliberately hitting every single stinking pothole on the goddamn highway.” Sure enough. After hitting one such pothole, a fist-sized rock came bouncing out of the truck bed onto the road between the dump truck and my car. I was hoping that the rock would bounce harmlessly beneath my car. Wrong. The rock bounced up over the hood of my car and slammed into my windshield, shattering it into a gazillion little pieces. Both the little pieces of windshield and the rock came flying into the front seat of the car. You know how you instinctively duck when you think shit is going to hit the front of your car. Well, we all ducked like scared little chickens. I yelled, “Holy shit!” The rock just barely missed my wife. She was screaming like a banshee. My kids were scared to death and screaming. I immediately started flashing my lights to get the dump truck driver’s attention. My wife asked me what I was going to do. I said that I was going to make the guy pay for a new windshield. So, I told her that if he pulled over, she needed to tell him that he was going to pay to replace my windshield. As luck would have it, when he and I pulled over to the side of the road, a KNP patrol car happened to be passing by and stopped. I showed the large rock that had bounced into my car and shattered the windshield to the KNP officer. My wife explained that I expected the dump truck driver to replace my shattered windshield because the rock had bounced out of his truck. After about 15 minutes of yelling and shouting and cursing in Korean, the KNP officer didn’t write a ticket for the dump truck driver. However, the KNP officer, the dump truck, and I formed a convoy to drive into Seoul to get my windshield replaced. As a result, we got to my wife’s uncle’s house in Chuncheon pretty late that night. Bright and early the next morning, my wife’s uncle took me on a hike up into the mountains. Once we got up into the mountains, he stopped at a little snack shack and bought two drink concoctions. The only things that I know for sure that were in those concoctions were some kind of black root, ginseng, and mamushi venom. My uncle told me that the stuff was supposed to be good for me because it was good for men’s stamina. The shit tasted god-awful. It smelled even worse. And it was hard to choke down. When he shelled out the money for that crap, I couldn’t believe how much he had to pay. I was like, “Holy shit! You actually had to pay for that shit?” He laughed and said, “Yeah. It’s really great. You want some more?” “No. I’m good. I think my stamina will be like rock solid for a month.” Later that afternoon, we played this game of Korean cards, I guess the closest thing to it would be poker. The game was a card game where the cards had pictures on the face of the cards. The name of the card game was Hwatu or Go-Stop. My relatives liked to drink shots of Soju and play Go-Stop for money. I played dumb and pretended not to understand how the game worked and waited until my relatives got good and drunk. Then, I would sit back and take all of their money. Our first visit to see my wife’s relatives went pretty well and it was pretty profitable for me. We only had one exercise in futility that really interfered with the trip, the bouncing rock that delayed our arrival in Chuncheon.
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