I was tasked to play war games in the G3 Controller Cell for Team Spirit while I was assigned 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 even had the privilege of a rather unpleasant experience that I had when I had the unique opportunity to visit a field laundry and bath facility to take a field shower while playing Army during the war games. I probably even mentioned my partner or colleague who worked with me in the G3 Controller Cell at Team Spirit. What I haven’t told you is what my friend’s name was. My friend was a Hangug Daewi or Korean Captain. His name was Daewi Kim. Daewi Kim and I got along pretty damn well. But occasionally, he would grab a notebook and a pencil and go into this kind of a quiet, pensive mood where he wasn’t speaking to me or to anybody else for that matter. While he was in that mood, he would have his nose glued to that notebook. Nothing I could do would get him to come out of his self-induced trance. It was as if the world around him ceased to exist while he was glued to that notebook. And while he was glued to that notebook, he would not let me or anyone else on the night shift see what he was writing in that notebook. It was weird and kind of creepy. Hell, I was just beginning to learn the Korean alphabet. I had to phonetically sound out words to read them. It would take me literally 10 or 15 minutes to read one sentence and figure out what it meant in Korean. So, it wasn’t like I was going to steal any secret information that he might have in his precious notebook. And on the off chance that it might be his secret diary to his lost lover, well, I think all of his secret love notes were safe with him. There was not much chance that I was going to uncover any secret fantasies that he might be penciling into that notebook. Cuz it would have taken me a month of Sundays to translate those secret fantasies. Do you have any idea just how long a month of Sundays is? A typical month could have either 30 or 31 days. I’m not even going to count February because that month doesn’t even have a clue how many days that it is supposed to have. Some years, it has 28 days. Other years, it has 29 days. It seems like it can never make up its mind how many days it’s supposed to have. But if you look really close at a calendar. Go on, take a close look, and you can go back as far as you want. Trust me. You will never find one, not even one February that has 30 days. Nope. Nada. So, forget the Februarys. For the sake of keeping everything nice and clean, I will just choose a month of Sundays with 30 days. What that means is that each of those 30 Sundays has to have all of the rest of the days of the week to go with it. Now if you’ve been paying attention in school, you know that a year has 52 weeks. Well, we’re talking about 30 weeks here. That’s damn near a whole year. Do you see where I’m going with this? There was no way in hell that I was going to be able to just sneak a peek into his notebook and read all of his precious secrets and instantly know what he had written. Oh hell no. It was going to take me damn near a whole year to figure out what he had written. That meant I would have needed to hijack his precious notebook, sneak off and Xerox copies of what I thought might be secret fantasy notes, and slip the notebook back to him undetected without getting caught. The odds of that happening were about as good as walking outside on any given day and glancing down at the sidewalk and discovering $1 million at my feet. Yeah. That happens every day. Cuz if it did, all of us would be rich by now. So, how is it that none of us are rich yet? I guess we all need glasses. Either that or we all need better glasses. You know. So, we can see that money that we all know is lying right there in front of us on the sidewalk. Anyway, a few days before the end of team Spirit, Daewi Kim finally opened his notebook and removed one piece of paper from the notebook. Then he handed it to me. I was stunned when I looked at it. It was a hand-sketched pencil portrait of me. And it was actually quite good. A portrait like that would easily fetch an artist in the U.S. anywhere from $80 to $200, depending on the artist and the type of material used. At the end of Team Spirit, when the maneuver units were standing down to prepare for deployment back to their home stations, we got another R&R (rest and relaxation) day. Daewi Kim and I went to a bathhouse at Wonju. Wonju, Korea, is a town near Camp Long. Camp Long was the nearest U.S. military base to the G3 Controller Cell location. Neither of us had ever been to Camp Long or Wonju. But between Daewi Kim’s ability to speak Korean and my ability to speak English, I figured that we would be able to get by just fine. And I wanted to return the favor and thank him in some small way for the pencil sketch that he had given me. He told me it was nothing, but he could not ever understand how much it meant to me. Nobody had ever done something like that for me before. We had to travel on the buses in military uniforms. But once we arrived in Wonju, we were able to change into civilian attire. Daewi Kim and I looked like an odd couple as we walked down the streets of Wonju going in and out of shops. However, it wasn’t until we went to the PX at Camp Long that I was able to find something that really piqued the curiosity and interest of Daewi Kim. We actually had to go back into the military clothing sales area of the PX because Camp Long didn’t have a separate military clothing sales store. All the way in the back, sitting up on a shelf, there was one Army Cavalry Hat. The lady working in the store told us that she was going to send it back because she couldn’t sell it. Daewi Kim looked like a kid in a candy store as soon as he saw that hat. So, I asked the lady if I could buy it. She said if I didn’t mind buying the display model that I could certainly buy it. I asked if I could perhaps get a little discount because they were trying to get rid of it and it was the display model. After a little haggling, the lady offered me a 10 percent discount and Daewi Kim walked out of the store as the proud owner of an Army Cavalry Hat. What’s more, since it didn’t have any insignia or rank on it, Daewi Kim put it on and wore it. If we weren’t the odd couple before, we certainly were now. At the end of the day, we boarded the buses and headed back to the G3 Controller Cell. We hadn’t encountered any exercises in futility to speak of this time, but my friend and I did have a pretty good time.
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