I had transitioned into my role as the chief of the Matériel Readiness Branch in the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Matériel, 19th Support Command, Camp Henry, Korea, with ease. My Guy Friday, Master Sergeant Milton Peterson, was my NCOIC. During our off-duty time, we did quite a bit of hiking together in the local mountains around Taegu. One particular Saturday, we headed up into the mountains with no set agenda. However, once we reached the summit ridgeline, we decided to head west on a trail that we normally didn’t take. That trail took us down into a valley of sorts and then wove up and down little hills. It was exactly the kind of trail we were looking for. At one point as we were headed uphill, we passed by a Korean happy mountain on our right side. For those of you that don’t know, a Korean happy mountain is a nice fancy way of saying cemetery. That’s right. You heard correctly. Well, actually, I guess you’re reading, so the right way to say it is that you read correctly. Whatever. You get the idea. We passed a cemetery. Cemeteries were not all that uncommon on lonely stretches of mountainsides way out in the boonies where people don’t usually go. And where we were that day was a place that people didn’t usually go. We could tell that simply because the trail we were on was not all riddled with trash. Koreans, as a general rule, were a whole lot better at picking up after themselves and packing out all of the trash that they brought into the mountains with them. Like I said, they were a whole lot better. I didn’t say that they were perfect. There was always that 10 percent bunch in every crowd. No matter where you went, that 10 percent crowd would damn sure spoil it for everybody. When it came to trashing up the place, that 10 percent crowd was right there in the thick of it. And I’m sure that the percentage of rotten apples in the barrel has gone up as time has gone on. What that means is that the 10 percent crowd has probably grown to around 40 percent or so by now. Anyway, Korean cemeteries do not look a whole lot like American cemeteries. In American cemeteries, you have row after row after row of granite and marble headstones of various sizes and shapes and designs that stretch on for days. Those headstones can be inscribed with all sorts of different memorial messages and family information as a sort of remembrance for the departed. The headstones can be standing upright, or they can be lying flat. In areas where cemeteries are below sea level, you may even see above-ground tombs. Now, contrast that with a Korean cemetery. A typical Korean cemetery plot isn’t marked with a headstone of any sort. The family just seems to know where in the hell their loved ones are buried in that cemetery. How in the hell that works, I have no idea. The particular cemetery we passed had a big arched wrought-iron gate with a big granite Presbyterian cross monument standing inside of the gate. Behind that and dotting the side of the mountain were a bunch of huge dirt mounds, some fresh and some grown over with grass. Those huge dirt mounds were the actual graves in the cemetery. There was a little trail that went all the way around the little mountain that the cemetery was built on. The reason that Koreans call their cemeteries happy mountains is because the cemeteries are literally built on mountains. Why did I tell you all of that? Cuz there’s going to be a quiz later. If you remember nothing else, remember that the cemetery was on our right as we were going West and we passed a big arched wrought-iron gate with a big granite Presbyterian cross monument standing inside of the gate. Remember those two things. They become very important later on. Well, my guy Friday and I tripped by that Korean happy mountain and proceeded on our way up another mountain until we ran smack dab into a rainstorm. Well, we weren’t actually running. We were just walking kinda fast. And we didn’t run into the rain like say a car would run into a tree. It was nothing like that. The rain sort of sneaked up on us. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Right after we ran into the rain, we hit a sheer rock face on the mountainside. Man, there seems to be a lot of sudden hitting going on. First, you have us hitting the rain, then you find us hitting rock faces. Hitting rain might not hurt too bad but hitting rock faces kinda sounds like it hurts. Going across that sheer rock face on a normal day when it was dry would have been slow going. However, in the rain, it was downright treacherous. We did notice a little lean-to built out of plastic and erected on the side of the sheer rock face about 200 yards away from where we were. We noticed a Korean monk exit the lean-to, so we waved to him. He motioned for us to come over. We went over and introduced ourselves, and he invited us into his little shelter. Once we were inside, he offered us the standard Korean snacks: Soju, peanuts, and dried squid. Yum, Yum. How could we resist? Especially the Soju. We drank shots of Soju while we munched on peanuts and dried squid and talked about nothing in particular. When it was getting to be midafternoon, we told our host that we had to leave to return to Sue Song Heights. We thanked our host for his hospitality, then we left. When we were walking back down the hill, it started to get foggy. Then, we ran into, or rather, we passed a Korean happy mountain on the right. That’s right. The happy mountain was on the right. What did that happy mountain look like? That is an awesome question. It had a big arched wrought-iron gate with a big granite Presbyterian cross monument standing inside of the gate, just like the first one did. Man, if that wasn’t the damnedest coincidence. But I thought for a minute, “Wait a second self, you have been hiking up in these mountains for better than a year without having once seen a cemetery. And now, in the span of less than four hours, you have managed to run into not one, but two, cemeteries. What are the odds?” Then I thought to myself, “Self, something just don’t smell right here. It seems to me that if something smells like shit, it has to be shit. Could this happy mountain be the same happy mountain that we passed by earlier? It certainly could be if the cemetery had two entrances, one on each end, and they were identical.” Somehow, as we headed down the mountain, we had taken a different trail, than we had on the way up the mountain. I told Milton that we needed to circle around to the other side of the cemetery to see if there was a gate on the other side. When we got over to the other side, we found an identical gate on that side. We also found a trail heading down the mountain. That trail had our names written all over it. We jumped on that trail and headed down the mountain in the fog. We got back to the Sue Song Heights Apartments just after dark. I don’t know how we had managed to play the happy mountain circle jerk up on the side of the hill in the fog. But that is surely what we did. After trying its damnedest to catch us in an exercise in futility, the happy mountain circle jerk gave up the ghost and we managed to escape.
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