I started out as a humble traffic analyst and worked in the analyst shop for over a year before eventually wormed my way onto Charlie trick, working TI with Faron Hall and Jim Withers. Bob Higgins was the trick chief -- what a character. We called him "Dad" among other things. Bob would motivate the 05H's to meet those COPES objectives in a number of highly inventive ways, such as:
"This is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard Field Station Korea Airlines. The weather at altitude is crisp and clear, with audibility unlimited. We expect a total flight time of 8 hours and should be landing in sunny Anjong-ni right on schedule. Please extinguish all smoking materials and fasten your seatbelts by inserting the metal tip somewhere. As soon as we reach our cruising altitude, the captain will turn off the 'fasten seatbelt' sign and you may feel free to move about the bay. We hope your shift is a pleasant one and if there is anything at all we can do to make the trip more pleasurable, please let one of the TI flight attendants know by ringing the call button on your arm rest."Or he would start singing show tunes with his own lyrics, like the following, sung to the tune of "If I Was a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof.
And so on. He could make up some pretty good songs, some of which I sing to my kids (with cleaned up language) even today.If I was a HB....
Ditty Ditty Dit, Ditty Ditty Dahhhhh
All day long I'd Dit Dit Dit Dah
If I was an HB Comm..
And then it would be eight hours of "CALLSIGN CHECK!" and "DROP HIM -- ALREADY COPIED!" and "GET SOME DF ON THAT ONE!" and so forth. Always loud, always profane, always exciting, especially on the hour and half hour. I would smoke about 30 cigarettes (although like Bill Clinton, I wouldn't actually inhale -- the darn thing would simply smoulder in those metal ash trays the Army had so many of back then, because we were too busy to smoke when things got busy). Lots of coffee, but I didn't drink much of it either. Occaisional tours as the "house mouse" having to be the maid for a day. All in all, though, fun and fulfilling.
We hung tails on people. God, we hung a lot of tails on people. It got out of hand, actually, but what the hell. Jim Withers could make a good looking tail from the tearoffs on that six-ply colored paper -- they were simply exquisite. After a while, people just automatically checked there back belt loop every ten minutes to see if one was hanging there. We had to get awfully creative to slip them onto the Hogs -- it usually meant low-crawling to their pos' while they were copying something hot, but you could also slip behind the bank of positions and sometimes slip one onto someone when they turned to yell at the TIs. One time Colonel Toomey, the Field Station Commander, came by the bay for something or other, and we managed to get one on him. The trick chief and the Watch NCO were trying to get it off before LTC Toomey found it. That was a great day.
We did not usually set fire to the tails -- that was taboo in our area, although it did happen in the other intercept bay on occaision, or when someone was enjoying their last day.
Rubbing the carbon paper around a pair of cans was always good for a laugh as well, although only the new guys would fall for it. After a month in the bay, all the hogs would have learned to rub the cans on their pants leg before putting them on their head. It was automatic, even if you had taken them off only seconds before. All it took was seconds for one of us to dust them with carbon paper.
Of course, we weren't the only ones playing tricks, and the 05Hs played their share on us (and outnumbered us at least 3 to 1 as well), but I don't remember them being successful. That is a classic example of selective memory, isn't it?
Every day, we would take a short moratorium from our TI duties to read "Dear Abby" which appeared daily in the Stars & Stripes. We would read it aloud to the hogs, along with appropriate commentary. During the daily recitation of Dear Abby, we would not take callsigns, so eventually everyone learned to simply shut up and listen. After all, that was one of the reasons that we were all out there on Freedom's Frontier -- to protect free speech. I remember one of those letters -- it sounded like a send-up, but Abby printed it anyway. This teenage girl was writing that even though Bobby had made her pregnant, cheated on her, and subsequently dumped her, she still loved him, and "please, Dear Abby, don't tell me to forget him because this is TRUE LOVE". Whatever. Abby, of course, said "DUMP HIM!" but we thought Bobby sounded like a pretty cool guy to hang around with, because he obviously knew how to sweet talk the ladies. This was, of course, in the days before I had daughters myself. Twenty-five years later, Bobby is my worst nightmare come to life, but back then, old Bobby sounded like a pistol.
If I remember correctly, there were ten (count 'em, ten) bars in the village of Anjong-ni outside of Camp Humphreys. However, the passage of time has made my memory cloudy. As soon as I get through the pictures, I'll flesh out this list. My feeble memory recalls only:
And who could forget the other landmarks, like the Conscientious Brown Door and the OB Bar?
Duffy's Tavern was the main hangout during my time, although there would be temporary allegiances to other bars for periods of time. It was still Duffy's that held our loyalty, though. On warm summer days, I remember sitting outside on the terrace drinking OB and listening to "Alice's Restaurant" and other classics along with dozens of familiar faces from FSK. There was also SAC-7, the Saturday Afternoon Club at 7 pm, where it got really drunk out. I had a pretty good time there, as I recall. And Duffy's was always a good place to hold the after-mids party, in the days when we still worked three rotating tricks.
During one of those memorable after-mids trick parties, we made up a batch of Purple Jesus. It was a combination of soju (clear liquor, taste similar to corn whiskey); OB beer (which still makes me nauseous to this day); makli (looks like milk of magnesia and is a byproduct of making rice wine); and Korean champaigne (sickeningly sweet, like Koolaid with bubbles and an alcohol content). That stuff got poured together into a chamber pot (a 'binjo' pot) and was passed from hand to hand around the table for everyone to take a drink. The rule was, if anyone put the pot down or if anyone puked, we would fill it up again. It was pretty awful and alarmingly potent. The party deteriorated after that, but a good time was had by all. After being up on Mids all night, the rest of the day would turn into a real haze as we drank crap like Purple Jesus and got into all other sorts of trouble. Those were the best parties, though. We would get between 20 and 40 guys participating, depending on the timing (if the end-of-mids fell on a weekend, we would get a load of day beggars to come play with us, in addition to the usual trick trash). I must have gone to a dozen or two dozen memorable after-mids parties, but I don't remember much. That is, I don't remember much that I'm going to tell on myself. However, during one of these parties at Duffy's Tavern, the DJ put on Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets," to which I did an impromptu striptease act. (It must have been fate, because five years later I was at Fort Bragg, paying for my sins while attending the SF Qualification Course. But that is a different story module than my Korea days). Here is a picture of an after-mids party -- click here to see a picture of me "gettin' naked" at one of those parties. The pictures of me "gotten naked" are omitted in the interest of decorum.
When LTC Toomey took over command in 1974, we were renamed "Toomey's Tigers" and the next thing you know, there was a tiger motif popping up all over the station. There was a giant tiger statue erected (click here to see a picture) and the messhall began featuring "Super Tiger Burgers" on the menu daily. A Super Tiger Burger was basically a big hamburger with secret sauce (ketchup, mayonaise and pickle juice), but they were pretty good. That tiger statue was pretty lame, though.
I was there when FSK went coed. We got our first contingent of WACs in 1974, which sort of changed things around as well. We had never sent anyone around to take the EMHO report before, but on the first day that a female came to work for the operations officer, she was sent around to collect one from the NCOs on duty. Jack Keister, who was the head TA in the Black Dragon shop, drew a .45 from the watch office and accompanied her on her rounds. The EMHO report, pronounced EEEM-OHH, was the Early Morning Hard On report. What a classic -- although it only worked once. It was sexual harrassment, but that wasn't against the rules back then, although in fairness it should have been. One good thing about being there during the transition is that I got to experience going from the ultra-macho, guys-only atmosphere to the mixed gender atmosphere. I did learn that women could do pretty much anything I could do, include pee standing up if they were of a mind to, and that was a pretty healthy lesson to learn for me at such a tender age.
Another interesting thing that started up during my tenure was the outdoor rock concerts. Essentially, these Korean bands would set up and play outdoors a la Woodstock. Like Woodstock, it also rained every damn time, but nobody really cared. We would sit out in the sun (while it lasted) drinking Boone's Farm wine and anything else we could get a hold of, and I don't really remember hearing any of the music. I do remember waking up covered with mud, soaked to the skin, and trudging back to the ASA compound with the Mother of All Hangovers and my good buddy Larry Schultz at my side.
Other happy memories include:
A couple of pictures of the field station property:
Follow this link to see some people pictures from Korea.
