While I served as the Chief of the Armament Maintenance Branch for the Deputy Chief of Staff, Matériel, 19th Support Command at Camp Henry, Korea, I worked nonstop for about a year without taking any time off except for the normal long weekends during national and federal holidays. Some of those long weekends turned out to be four-day weekends because Eighth Army would usually award one day off as a training holiday in conjunction with the three-day holiday weekend. During most of those holiday weekends, I took advantage of the fact that it was a holiday weekend and that I had a lot of customers who did not like to pull staff duty during the holiday weekend. Even though that was back in the days before Lasik eye surgery, and I was very nearsighted back then, on days leading up to those long holiday weekends, I could see for miles and miles unaided. In fact, you might say that I could see all of my customers coming from a mile away. And as eager as they were to unload their staff duty commitment, they always failed to see the rather large dollar signs radiating from my eyes. And after I took their money, I smiled all the way to the bank. Well, I probably laughed out loud. And if truth be told, I didn’t actually take the money to the bank per se. You see, my wife was the proverbial bank. She took all of the spoils of my staff duty labor. Oh, I did manage to squeeze a dollar or two out of her here and there, every once in a while. But my wife definitely pocketed the lion’s share of the booty. And I’m pretty sure she wasn’t stashing that money in any bank either. However, on a few of those long holiday weekends, my family and I did drive by car to visit a few Korean historical sites: the Silla Kingdom palace, the Baekje Kingdom palace, and Buddhist temples near Taegu. But after my first year in Korea, I was ready for a vacation. I told my wife that I didn’t want to just take a few days off to hang around Taegu and visit local attractions or go to visit her relatives. I told her that I wanted to really take a vacation and go someplace. Someplace that we had never been before. As it turned out, my wife thought that was a great idea. I was kind of surprised. Actually, surprised is a bit of an understatement. I was shocked. So, when my wife came up with an idea of where to go, I was even more surprised. She suggested that we drive down to Busan and catch a boat over to the island of Jeju-Do. I say a boat ride, but it was actually an ocean-going ferry. The ferry had multiple decks – three to be exact – that were open to passengers. The top deck was an open deck for passengers to enjoy the ocean. The lower two decks were for passengers who did not have “sea legs” and for those who wanted to sleep. The ferry ride to Jeju-Do was a 12-hour ride. The ferry set sail at approximately 5:00 PM the afternoon that we departed. Most of the journey occurred during the night. More than 60 percent of the passengers aboard that ferry were landlubbers. About 10 minutes after we left the port in Busan, those landlubbers were green around the gills and as sick as dogs. People were bent over the rail on the top deck blowing their toasties except most of them were Koreans and I don’t think that any of them ate toasties. I think most of them were blowing kimchi and rice. At least the bottom feeders were eating well. Below deck, the people that were too sick to make it to the top deck to blow their lunch overboard, simply barfed right where they sat. Then, those sorry ass landlubbers just swam in their own puke. The two lower decks smelled so bad of vomit that a normal person could not tolerate it. As a result, my wife and I ended up remaining on the top deck for most of the voyage to Jeju-Do. We had the foresight to buy and feed our daughter and son Dramamine for motion sickness. They ended up sleeping for most of the voyage. My wife’s younger sister traveled with us, but she was as sick as a dog for most of the voyage like most of the other passengers. However, she flat refused to take the Dramamine. That Dramamine could have saved her a lot of misery and upchuck-a-wucca. As a result, she stayed below deck with our luggage and our children. My wife and I enjoyed a spectacular sunset after all of the sick, lame, and lazy stragglers finished puking over the side of the ferry and crawled below deck. At one point, my wife attempted to go below deck to get some sleep, but she came back a few minutes later saying that it smelled too bad down below. I didn’t even bother to go down to check it out. I took her word for it. After all, we were on the voyage from hell. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the hell out of that ferry ride. But imagine what would’ve happened if we had encountered bad weather and rough seas. That little ferry would have been tossed about like that tiny ship that set sail that fateful day from that Tropic port for a three-hour cruise. We had one helluva lot more people crammed aboard that ferry than were on that tiny ship and our voyage was scheduled for a helluva lot longer. We might not have miraculously shipwrecked near any island, regardless of whether it had luxuries such as running water, lights, motor cars, and shelter, or not. I’m not even sure how many of those poor sick bastards curled up in the fetal position below deck could even swim if we happened to get shipwrecked at sea. I knew I could swim. I knew that my wife and my daughter could swim. And I was pretty certain that I could keep my son afloat as long as he had his lifejacket on. As far as safety features on that ferry went, I remember that we all had to wear lifejackets. But I can’t say as I remember whether there were any lifeboats on that ferry. And even if there were, would it have been another situation like the lifeboat situation on the Titanic? Cuz that meant that a helluva bunch of those sick-as-dog sardines curled up in the fetal position below deck could kiss their asses goodbye. That right there would’ve been a Kodak moment, by the way. Of course, we didn’t have any big name celebrities booked to sing the tear-jerker theme song as the ferry was going down, hypothetically, of course. And the water was pretty warm, so there wouldn’t be any frozen bodies bobbing around in the water like ice cubes. Dammit. But other than that, we had all of the makings of one helluva tear-jerker epic disaster story that never happened. As it was, the voyage from hell ended without incident. We arrived at the city of Jeju where the ferry docked. I think the sick landlubbers were only too happy to walk on terra firma once again. As for my family and I, we looked forward to a vacation on Jeju-Do without any undue exercises in futility.
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