As a teenage fuck up who had recently and barely graduated high school, I, of limited opportunities, joined the U. Army in the summer of I had never been outside the northeast U.
Cool, I thought, I'd be close to my girlfriend, in Harrisburg, Pa.. But then, in what I would later understand to be in true U. Army fashion, a last minute phone call came in: I would instead be dispatched to South Korea, a country that seemed for my lovelorn heart to be on the other side of the planet.
Ostensibly, the U. For many Koreans, I would later learn, Korea was a single country, the 38th Parallel between utterly arbitrary, rendered asunder only by external politics. In any case, if North Korea were to invade the south, we were the ones to spring into action, potentially giving up our lives for our country.
It didn't come to that. Mostly it was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. The camp I was assigned to, Camp Stanley, had a library, a place of worship, and offered GI's weekend day tours to points of historical interest. But, like most of the enlisted there, my interests soon turned to the village or "'ville" as it was called right outside the camp itself.
Probably every Army base around the world has one of these small towns attached to them, with easy pleasures for the enlisted: booze, greasy food, prostitution, and, if you knew the right people, pretty much anything else. I will say this about the U. It does teach you to get shit done. You can stay up until 3 AM the night before, aided by drink and who knows what other enhancements, but come 5 a.
