When I served as the Commander of the 305th Supply and Services Company in the 227th Maintenance Battalion At Yongsan, Seoul, Korea, the company passed several major tests and milestones. And the company picked up new missions without skipping a beat. Now, my unit mess hall was being evaluated for the Army Philip A. Connelly Award for Food Service Excellence. However, my company was also being deployed to Team Spirit, which was an annual war game exercise conducted by the Republic of Korea Armed Forces and United Nations Armed Forces. The United Nations Armed Forces included the US Forces Korea soldiers and airmen deployed in the Republic of Korea as well as other soldiers deployed into Korea temporarily for the Team Spirit exercise. My company had deployed the following elements: the company headquarters, the company mess hall, the Class II & IV supply warehouse operation, packaged POL, water purification operations, transportation operations, delivery of palletized meals forward to the combat elements during the Team Spirit exercise, the laundry and bath unit and clothing exchange operations, a field Self-Service Supply Center (SSSC), and the Graves registration operations. I placed special emphasis on the deployment of my mess hall to the field and therefore had included deployment of the mess hall in my advanced party deployment. I had learned upon deploying my company that I had a serious parking issue whenever my mess hall started serving meals. I fixed that problem by setting up a vehicle parking lot for the mess hall. I also received clearance from Team Spirit Exercise Operations to establish a helipad. I also noticed that most of the people dining in my mess hall chose to dine in the dining tent that was showing movies rather than the one that was playing music. To fix that problem, I had to prioritize folks dining in the dining tent that was playing music and then shift them over to the dining tent that was showing movies after they had eaten in order to balance out the number of people in each dining tent. Another problem that presented itself, rather early into the Team Spirit exercise was the fact that Team Spirit was proving to be an exceptionally wet Team Spirit exercise. I created a 180-degree turn-out for drivers to pull in next to the staging tent for the dining facility in order to drop off senior officers that wished to dine at the facility. After dropping senior officers off at the staging tent, drivers could proceed into the parking lot and park their vehicles. However, I still had a unique problem with the helipad. I couldn’t just let helicopters land right next to the staging tent. So, I set up a shuttle service to haul passengers from the helipad to the mess hall and back, and I assigned two Commercial Utility Cargo Vehicles (CUCV), and two drivers to operate the shuttle service during the standard meal hours every day. Midway through Team Spirit, a helicopter flew in just as the noon meal was getting into high gear. It turned out that the passengers aboard that helicopter were the inspectors for the Department of the Army Philip A. Connelly Award for Food Service Excellence. The inspectors were not a new set of inspectors. They were the same team of inspectors that had inspected us for the 19th Support Command level inspection and the Eighth United States Army level inspection. The only difference was that this was a new inspection and, for this inspection, we were also in the field. Other than that it was business as usual, sort of. Each of the inspectors did the same sort of things that they did on previous inspections, so we knew what to expect. However, I think we still caught them off guard. That became quite apparent as soon as they stepped into the staging tent. They were not expecting solid wood floors throughout the dining facility. Additionally, I don’t think that they were expecting a full dining facility operation, such as we had in Garrison. I heard several ‘very goods’ before they ever began to inspect anything. So, I decided to take the entire inspection team on a full tour of the entire dining facility before they began their formal inspection. I started with the tent for the short order serving line, and then I proceeded to the tent with the full entrée serving line. From there, I took them into the dining tent that played live music with the upright piano. Each of the tables in both dining rooms had tablecloths and centerpiece arrangements. We provided this service the same as we had provided the service in Garrison. They were shocked to see and hear that we had live music. Finally, I took them into the second dining tent that was showing movies. I explained the flow through the dining facility as I was walking. They simply couldn’t believe that we were offering these types of services to our customers while they dined. I informed them that the music and the movies were available at all hours of the day whenever soldiers wanted to come in and get some coffee and/or soup and relax for a while. It seemed as if the Connelly inspection team was very impressed with our operation. They conducted and concluded their inspection without any exercises in futility.
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