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. Oh, and I managed to get fired and rehired to my job as commander not once, not twice, but three times. I had also been recognized with individual leadership awards while in command, and my mess hall was currently 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 was deploying 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. The mess officer, Sergeant First Class (SFC) Ward, the company First Sergeant, and I held a meeting to discuss how to deploy the mess hall. We decided that we would need four general-purpose (GP) medium tents for the deployment, one for the short order food line, one for the main course food line, and two dining rooms (one dining room featuring mood music and the other broadcasting closed circuit movies). We decided that each of these tents would be co-located and conjoined. We also decided that we would set up a fifth GP medium tent as an entry walkway into the two food service tents. We decided that there would be two lines formed inside the entry tent for headcount sign in, one for the short order line, and one for the main course food line. We decided that the entry tent would not require a raised solid floor. I had secured an upright piano and a TV and VCR combination at the Property Disposal Office (PDO). We also decided that all of the tents necessary for Food Service and the dining rooms would need raised solid floors, which would require lots of pallets covered with plywood. The reason for the raised solid floors seemed intuitively obvious. Team Spirit was typically held in late winter or early spring, and that meant that we could be assured of receiving rain or snow or both while we were deployed for Team Spirit. I couldn’t take any chances with unstable flooring upon which the tables had to sit, and I couldn’t take any chances with rivers and streams running through the middle of my mess hall. Such conditions could be downright treacherous, and they could cause all sorts of consternation and pain. I could envision all sorts of bad accidents happening with people slipping and sliding through mud and rivers of slime and spilling food and hot soup and hot beverages all over the gotdamn place. That could make one helluva gotdamn mess. It would be especially bad if such a disaster were to befall a flag rank officer who happened to be visiting said mess hall or if some poor unlucky slob just happened to slip, and spill all of his shit all over the got damn place right as a general walked in front of him. Oh, heavens to megatroid! That would be really bad. Doom! Destruction! Dragons to the fray! Heads would roll. Especially if all of that spilled shit just happened to land on that general. And of course, that’s exactly what in the hell would happen. So, I suspect some of those heads would be well placed heads within my company. And naturally, I might not be so lucky this time around. Thus, we definitely needed the raised solid floors. I told the mess officer to put in a requisition for the plywood required to build the floors. I also asked him to scrounge around for pallets. I requested permission from my Battalion Commander to deploy my company advanced party, my company headquarters, my company security team, the laundry and bath unit and clothing exchange operations, and the company mess hall a day ahead of the main party. Our main party was deploying a week in advance of the start of Team Spirit. But the reason that I asked for early deployment of some elements was so that they could get set up and operational to accommodate other advanced elements that were deploying into the exercise box a week in advance of the start of Team Spirit. I also requested permission to shut down mess hall operations at my Garrison mess hall location two days prior to its deployment to Team Spirit. I augmented my mess hall staff with five additional Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army (KATUSA) soldiers to assist with field mess hall set up, headcount, and daily operations as needed. The mess hall in the field was going to require tables and chairs to be set up in each of the dining tents. On the appointed day, the advanced elements of my company deployed to their designated locations within the exercise box for Team Spirit to begin setting up. Their deployment went without any significant exercises in futility though I couldn’t say the same for this whole field deployment.
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