When I served as the chief of the Matériel Readiness Branch in the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Matériel, 19th Support Command, Camp Henry, Korea, I got to do a lot of new and exciting things. I also traveled to a lot of places in Korea that were fun to visit but that I would never have wanted to have been stationed at. However, one tasking that I was asked to perform literally took me by surprise. When I say that it took me by surprise, I mean that it caught me with my pants down. I was caught completely off guard. This was one of those events where if you’ve ever ridden a motorcycle unshielded you will know what I’m talking about. Suppose that you are riding a motorcycle on a nice hot sultry summer evening just before sunset. Is the stage set? Does everybody have the picture visualized in their mind? Now, further pretend that you are on a wide open highway with a cool breeze in your hair, mouth wide open, gasping for as much of that fresh summer breeze as you can possibly inhale into your lungs. Unfortunately, that is the witching hour for all of the nasty skeeters, gnats, grasshoppers, and other assorted bugs that decide that they want to swarm straight into your mouth and choke the living shit out of you. What ends up happening is that you eat two or three pounds of those goddamn bugs. If you’re lucky, it’s the big juicy squishy kind that explodes upon impact in your mouth. You know the kind. That’s the kind that, when they hit the windshield of your car, they splash all over the goddamn place and leave one helluva mess that goes on for days across the windshield. If, on the other hand you’re an unlucky bastard, well all I can do is shake my head in sorrow. Cuz you’re the kind of person who gets dive bombed by a gazillion little, kamikaze black bugs or gnats that fly in huge swarms. You see, if you’re that unlucky bastard, those little bastards will hit you straight in the mouth by the gazillions. And let me tell you something. Those little bastards sting like hell when they hit you. You feel like you’re getting sandblasted with little beads of pepper and that shit is being rubbed into your skin. Yeah. It’s like 90 grit. That’s some really rough shit. And you know the kind of those bugs that I’m talking about too. They’re the kind that, when they hit your windshield, they hit your windshield in a cloud and pepper the whole damn windshield with little spots all over the gotdamn place. What it looks like is that somebody took a shotgun and blasted the shit out of your windshield with bugshot. Yeah, I know they don’t have a shotgun round called bugshot. But they ought to. Cuz that’s what the hell it looks like after a swarm of those little bastard’s hits your windshield. Anyway, that’s how bad I was caught off-guard by this tasking that I’m about to tell you about. The Chief of Staff and my boss walked into my office one day. I thought they were there to talk to me about my impending reassignment to the 227th Maintenance Battalion to take command of 305th Supply and Services Company up in Seoul. No such luck. They said, “Captain Masters, you’re in luck. We have got a deal for you.” Whenever somebody says some bullshit like that, you know straight up that they’re lying through their Goddamn teeth. I would much rather hear somebody tell me some bullshit like, “We have got a deal for you. It’s not a great deal. In fact, it’s not even a good deal. But it’s the only deal that you are going to get.” But no. I had to hear their happy horse shit. So, I just said, “Just give it to me straight. Don’t piss down my neck and tell me it’s raining. Don’t sugarcoat it and tell me it’s candy. Just give it to me.” So, my boss said, “I have no choice. I am sending you to Team Spirit to work in the G3 Controller Cell. They needed somebody with translation skills. And you’re the closest thing I’ve got to that.” First of all, whenever somebody tells you that they have no choice, they’re lying through their teeth. Second of all, when he said that he needed somebody with translation skills, and I was the only person he had. I knew straight up that he was talking cash shit. He was straight up talking out of his ass. I had no translation skills. Being married to a Korean and living in Korea do not count as having translation skills. I tried to put up an argument, but I quickly lost. Two eagles trump a Captain. Can you guess where I went? If you guessed: out to freeze my ass in a tent on the side of a mountain playing Team Spirit, you guessed right. Forget the fact that I was in a garri-trooper unit and didn’t have any pioneer gear. As they promised or threatened, depending on how you look at it, I was assigned to the G3 Controller Cell alongside a Korean Captain. Our job was to keep the war game operations board updated during the night shift and prepare a daily sit-rep (situation report) on wargame status of the blue and red forces and provide updated troop casualty reports, troop movement reports, unit movement reports, troop replacement status, and weather reports for the day shift. In reality, our job only took up about an hour of our 12-hour shift. That left us with 11 hours to kill. Eleven hours is a long time when you are freezing your ass. I would teach my Korean Captain English and he would teach me Korean. But we also did something that we thought was kind of amusing. We played our own game of Army. We fought our own war between the blue and the red forces. We would spend a few hours each night pretending to blow shit up and annihilate entire units of soldiers only to rearrange the board and do it all over again. Other than the fact that I spent an exercise in futility freezing my ass in the name of playing wargames, I enjoyed my time wargaming with my Korean Captain friend.
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