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. My company was currently participating in the Team Spirit field exercise, and it 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. My delivery of palletized meals forward to combat elements was a huge operation during the team spirit exercise. It was so large that I was using soldiers on loan from the 61st Maintenance Company as well as my own Class I supply operations soldiers to perform the mission. We received palletized meal resupply by rail. Then, my soldiers would unload the palletized meals from the railcars in order to reallocate, redistribute, and palletize the meals for delivery forward to the combat elements participating in the Team Spirit exercise. The soldiers on loan from the 61st Maintenance Company were primarily responsible for unloading the palletized meals from the railcars. My Class I supply operations soldiers were responsible for reallocating, redistributing, and palletizing the meals for delivery. My transportation platoon, augmented with elements from the 598th Maintenance Company, was responsible for the actual delivery forward to the combat elements. The soldiers from the 61st Maintenance Company were not supposed to touch the railcars or any of the cargo until the railcars had been staged at the railhead. This was a very important safety measure that had to be maintained and followed. So, imagine my surprise early one morning when I received a rather panicked emergency radio call from someone using the call sign, calling ‘Nine-One-One.’ Whomever it was that transmitted the call using the call sign, calling ‘Nine-One-One,’ sounded rather distressed. I responded and asked what the problem was? The distressed radio operator replied that there was an emergency at the railhead and asked for immediate assistance. No further details were given. I told my First Sergeant to summon my driver. When Kato arrived, I asked him to prepare the Black Beauty for movement to the railhead. When Kato arrived at the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) with the Black Beauty, we departed for the railhead. While we were enroute to the railhead, Kato asked me what was happening? I replied, “I don’t know. I received a rather urgent, somewhat distressed call from somebody to the call sign, calling ‘Nine-One-One.’ I didn’t get any details, but the person at the other end said it was an emergency. So, I figured that we need to go check it out. I just hope it isn’t another case of some dumb shit getting his vehicle stuck in the mud because he doesn’t know how to drive or some dumb shit like that. When we arrived at the railhead, one look at the situation was all it took. The situation was indeed an emergency. It appeared that a soldier had been pinned between a railcar and the loading dock. I couldn’t understand how in the hell that could happen. Soldiers weren’t supposed to be anywhere near the goddamn railcars until they were staged. The first thing that needed to happen was that we needed to call ‘Nine-One-One,’ for real. We needed to get some medics out here with an ambulance and some life-saving equipment ASAP. We didn’t want to touch that railcar or that soldier without having experts on site. I asked the NCOIC. How long before I had arrived that the accident had occurred. He indicated that the accident had happened shortly before I received the radio call. That told me that the soldier had been pinned between the railcar and the loading dock for at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Things were not looking very good for that soldier. I asked the NCOIC. Why in the hell didn’t they call an ambulance before they called me? Of course, they didn’t have a response. I called the Battalion Commander to alert him of the situation. I asked if the NCOIC knew who the soldier was? But he was not sure of the soldier’s identity. When the ambulance and the rescue equipment arrived, the soldier was freed from between the railcar and the railhead. He was then placed in the ambulance and rushed to the nearest hospital. I heard later that he had died on the way to the hospital. The soldier had been pinned between the railcar and the railhead for too long a period of time and had sustained too much internal organ damage. The soldier had died because he had not followed the proper procedures in place at the railhead and he was not under proper supervision. The accident had occurred because there were several exercises in futility executed during that operation on that particular day.
*Snafu – Situation now all f*cked up
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