Day Two – An Ode to Military Humor

Well, my days serving as the Commander of the 305th Supply and Services Company in the 227th Maintenance Battalion At Yongsan, Seoul, Korea, had come and gone.  And my fantastic vacation to the island of Guam with my family had also come and gone.  It’s funny how time flies when you are having fun.  And it is also funny how time seems to drag on and on when you are doing something boring and mundane.  But I must say that I didn’t really have any dull moments where I performed boring and mundane tasks, even while working on the staff of the Eighth United States Army G4.  If you read some of my posts about the time I spent on the staff of the Eighth United States Army G4, you may recall reading about the new general that came in and thought he was going to whip us all into physical shape.  Well, if you did read those posts, you may recall that what actually happened was that the general promptly fell on his face and died of a heart attack while attempting to show us just how out of shape we really were.  Oh yeah.  That went really well.  You may also remember reading about my involvement with the Hash.  More recently, I have been talking about how I was getting ready to leave Korea, and the challenges of raising small children while on active duty in the military.  More specifically, I talked about some specific escapades performed by my son whom I dubbed the master of disaster.  If you will recall from my most recent post, my son learned the hard and painful way that Superman cannot fly in real life.  Rather, he learned that Superman reacts to gravity just like everybody else.  He falls.  Then I was subjected to one of my flight from hell scenarios that I had discussed previously.  That flight from hell scenario that I had described was one where you are trapped on a transoceanic flight with screaming kids.  Except on this particular transoceanic flight, I had created the screaming kid scenario.  My son with a broken arm was the screaming kid and I could not get him to shut up to save my ass.  Everybody around me was telling me to get the kid to shut up.  But how do you do that, when all you have is Tylenol and the kid has a broken arm?  I had fed him some whiskey, but it wasn’t like I could feed him one of those whole shot bottles of whiskey.  Cuz let’s face it I didn’t know if the kid could handle it.  Plus, I didn’t want to be accused of child abuse.  Then there were the judgmental passengers sitting near me with prying eyes who might happen to be watching what I was doing.  I didn’t need their negative opinions about how I was raising my kids.  And there was the fact that I didn’t want to turn my son into an alcoholic at an early age.  Then a doctor came to my rescue.  He gave me some small pills and told me to feed them to my son with some whiskey to quiet him down.  That did the trick.  The rest of the flight to Hawaii was uneventful.  You may remember that we spent the entire first day of our vacation in Hawaii at Tripler Army Medical Center, so the entire first day of our vacation was a bust.  However, we did manage to attend a luau sponsored by the Hale Koa Hotel the evening of the first day we were in Hawaii.  On the morning of our second day in Hawaii, we had to return to Tripler Army Medical Center for an appointment with the doctors.  After wasting about three hours, we found out that once again, they were unable to put a cast on my son’s arm because the swelling had not gone down quite enough.  Then they asked me where I was staying.  I told them that we were staying in the Hale Koa Hotel.  They asked me why I wasn’t staying at the Tripler Army guest lodge since my son was a patient at the hospital?  I told them that I didn’t know that there was a guest lodge.  The doctors gave me written authorization to stay in the guest lodge and a transfer document to take over to the guest lodge along with my leave paperwork in order to get a room.  When we went to check in at the Tripler Army guest lodge, we got a three room suite for twenty-three bucks ($23) a night.  The suite had a bedroom and living room and the kitchen.  The couches in the living room turned into beds, so we were able to let our kids sleep in the living room.  My wife and I slept in the bedroom.  The accommodations at Tripler Army guest lodge were not right on the ocean like the Hale Koa Hotel was, but they were bigger and we could cook in our room, and they were a helluva lot cheaper.  Our room at the Hale Koa Hotel had cost us somewhere in the vicinity of eighty or ninety dollars a night for just two double beds and a shower and a balcony with an ocean view.  We had to go somewhere else for all of our meals.  At least at the Tripler Army guest lodge, we could buy groceries at the commissary and cook in our quarters.  That coupled with the cost of the quarters saved us a lot of money on the vacation.  After we finished renting our room at the guest lodge, we checked out of the hotel.  Then we went shopping at the commissary.  After we finished shopping at the commissary, we decided to drive up to the north end of the island to check out some of the sites and scenery.  Other than the fact that day two of our vacation was a total waste of time at the hospital, we did manage to relocate and save some money on our vacation expenses.  Things were starting to look up.  Day two proved to be another significant exercise in futility, but hey things were improving.

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