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 this Team Spirit was proving to be an exceptionally wet field training 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. First, military pilots aren’t that great at flying so one of them could miss and crash into a tent and tear the whole damn place up. That wouldn’t work. And even if the pilot didn’t miss and crashed into a tent, if that pilot landed too damn close to the tent, the rotors might blow the goddamn tent away while he was dropping his VIP passengers off. That would never work either. My only solution seemed to be to set up a shuttle service to haul passengers from the helipad to the mess hall and back. I assigned two Commercial Utility Cargo Vehicles (CUCV), and two drivers to operate the shuttle service during the standard meal hours every day. I made sure that my Mess Sergeant, Sergeant First Class (SFC) Ward posted a sign near the entrance to the mess hall staging tent stating that the shuttle service to and from the helipad would only be available during the standard dining facility hours. Otherwise, some sonofabitch would fly in at 8 o’clock at night and expect to get a ride from the helipad over to the mess hall to pick up some soup and coffee. Oh hell no. That shit wasn’t gonna fly. Standard dining facility hours only. Otherwise, they would just have to walk from the helipad over to the dining facility. We did attempt to provide outstanding service, but we weren’t going to baby our customers. After all, they were in a simulated war time environment. Some of those generals had even been in real war time environments before. And I am pretty goddamn sure that they didn’t have it this goddamn nice. Of course, I could be wrong. Nah. Nope. No way. They might have had curbside service, but I am pretty sure that they didn’t have live music and movies in any of their mess halls during the wars. Hell. That’s what the USO shows were for. What we were trying to provide at our mess hall in the field was something similar to the same service that we provided in Garrison. Apparently it was working. It seemed like half of the soldiers participating in Team Spirit were eating at my mess hall. I am pretty sure that’s an exaggeration, but that is what it seemed like. And we maintained an outstanding level of service without any exercises in futility.
by 
by 