When I served as the chief of the Matériel Readiness Branch in the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Matériel, 19th Support Command, Camp Henry, Korea, I got to do a lot of new and exciting things. Like traveling to a lot of places in Korea that were fun to visit but that I would never have wanted to have been stationed at. I even had the thrilling experience of being tasked to play war games in the G3 Controller Cell for Team Spirit. What I didn’t talk about when I spoke of that exciting trip to Team Spirit were the few interludes where I was allowed to leave the G3 Controller Cell for a few hours of R&R (rest and relaxation). Before you get all excited and think that this is one of those stories, let me just stop you and say that it is not. Cuz you have to understand that we were out in the middle of the goddamn boonies. We were 50 miles east of East Tim Buck. If you’ve never heard of East Tim Buck, well, it is about 20 miles south of Timbuktu. I know what you’re thinking. That can’t be a real place. Believe me. It is. If you don’t believe me, just ask me. I’ve been there. I may not remember exactly how to get there, but I can get you into the ballpark. Of course, you may get lost along the way. And you may even wind up in the wrong ballpark. What I’m trying to tell you here is that it took us a few hours just to drive to civilization. But we couldn’t go straight to civilization, you see. Cuz we hadn’t been to a proper bathing facility since we had been sent out to Team Spirit. That meant that we had to go to a bathing facility first. I thought that meant that we were going to go to a Korean bathhouse. Well, that’s what I thought. Pretty dumb of me to even start thinking. After all, we were in the Army, and we were in the field. More specifically, we were in the field playing pretend war. When you are in a war, you can’t just go take a shower or a bath at a civilian facility. Perish the thought. That would be too civilized. Oh hell no. You have to be a manly man or a womanly woman, as the case were. Real men and real women, especially those in the military, do not pretend to be civilized during a war. So, naturally, you have to shower in the field. What did we do first? You guessed it. We went to a field laundry and bath facility. It was located on a snow-covered mountain about 70 or 80 miles west of our location. But we couldn’t just drive there. Oh hell no. That just would not do. The power honcho had to round us up and herd us on to buses like cattle first. And buses moved a whole lot slower, so it took forever to get anywhere. And it took us forever to get to the laundry and bath facility. I think it was even higher in altitude than our location because they had a helluva lot more snow than we had. It was also considerably colder there as well. It was colder than a soldier dressed in steel armor standing guard duty out in the snow in Antarctica. The tactical bath facility consisted of three tents for the male shower and three tents for the female shower. Each of the tents was about the size of a GP medium tent. The first tent was supposed to be the changing tent, where soldiers came in from the field and took off their dirty uniforms and prepared to take a shower. They could also shave in that tent. I think the tent was supposed to be heated by two pot bellied stoves. Well, that’s what I think because the holes in the roof of the tent where the pipe from each of the stoves would run through to vent were where a person would expect them to be. However, the pot bellied stoves and their accompanying pipes were not where they were expected to be. I guess they were missing in action. Maybe they were early casualties of the pretend war. The second tent was directly connected to the first tent, and it housed the actual shower facility. I cannot recall off the top of my head exactly how many soldiers that shower unit could accommodate at one time. What I do know is that it was supposed to provide warm water. That’s what it was supposed to provide. The water coming out of the shower heads was about two degrees above freezing. I had been in cold pond water at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the winter that was warmer than that damn shower water. As soon as I stepped underneath the running water in the shower, my heart stopped, and I almost swallowed my tongue. My teeth instantly started chattering. My skin turned to gooseflesh and I was shivering violently. I immediately shut off the water while I lathered up. I had to turn on the icicles one more time for about 30 seconds, and torture myself while I rinsed off the soap and shampoo. I immediately ran to the third tent, which was also connected to the shower tent. The third tent was where soldiers could dry and dress in their clean uniforms and get out the door of the bath facility. I needed to get out of the bath facility as quickly as I could so that I could warm up. I was damn near freezing to death. That little rub-a-dub-dub adventure had nearly turned my skin blue. I had a bad case of hypothermia. Had I known then what I knew a few short months later, I would’ve jacked those soldiers up who were running that laundry and bath facility. It turned out that I was about to inherit that messed up operation. If that was a sign of how things were in the 305th Supply and Services Company, I was going to have my work cut out for me. But I didn’t know that I was about to inherit that messed up operation. As it was, I chalked that experience up to an exercise in futility caused by living in the field playing pretend war.
by 
by 