K-1: One Week In:

How did this happen?

This week that has passed?

I just finished watching the Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

Where in the world am I?

Taco Bell and Burger King and the USPS and Comedy Central and Asian persons working all around me.

Why, it feels pretty much like being at my apartment in Albuquerque working on Kirtland AFB.

Looking at the white stork-like birds walking around on the grassy knoll five stories down below my window let’s me know that there is something different here, a clue that I’m not still back in the States someplace in the desert.  

I’m told that under this field and knoll is one huge bunker, a reminder for me that the reason for this base at all is the fact that the North Koreans might take it upon themselves to liberate South Korea by first bombing the shit out of them.

Hmmm.

Sounds familiar.

Come to think of it, the area looks kind of like the mounds found all over England which cover up ancient sites of human habitation.

 Maybe those were really bunkers, built to protect the local populace from the space aliens who were busy laying down “lay lines” and setting up Stonehenge and big heads on far flung islands, etc.

Maybe it’s getting late.

I might well be convinced that I’m really back at Willow Grove Navel Air Station, PA, a now former base near where I grew up. There was an amusement park right next to the base cleverly named Willogrove Park. On one side of the fence - pretend airplanes. On the other, the real deal. Only, it cost more to get into the amusement park. I think the Pentagon ran them both.

I remember that one day a jet from that base broke the sound barrier flying over our town, creating a defining boom. I was sitting on my bed beside my mom who was giving me another pleading lecture about my having just been sent home from school for the third or forth time. We both levetated off the bed (or that's what it felt like) and I remember saying, “Well, Mom, I guess there goes the furnace!”

Cracked her up and saved my butt.

Many of the buildings here have that 50’s era military look about them.

Maybe it’s the huge metal water tower painted red and white checkerboard with the flashing light on top that triggers this sense of déjà vu (damn,  if the spell check didn’t have déjà vu! In it!

 I wonder if George Carlin’s had vuja de in his spell check, i.e. the feeling that you’ve never ever been here before?)

And why does he keep coming to mind anyway? Could it be…SATAN!?!?

So, this bunker below, if discovered a few thousand millennia in the future, may be thought at that time to have been an actual  habitat which was for some reason abandoned without ever having been lived in.

Probably because of some consequence of global warming - or no view.

I guess that’s better than finding that it HAD been lived in, which would probably mean that the crazy N. K.’s ended up dropping a nuclear device on the area.

But, perhaps it will turn out like the cold war era contingency plan to house five thousand people in the Grand Canyon Caverns in AZ, in case of nuclear war.  Happily unused, the supplies -  water, canned and dried food, Spam, and Ooops! only one case of toilet paper -

remain stashed there to this day.

All this can and probably should be seen.

Dynamite buffet too.

(head west from Flagstaff on I-40, take the Seligman exit and Rt. 66 West. You can’t miss it – unless you’re on a dice trip).

So, on this, my first day as the lone MFLC on this base, began by attending a commander’s call for a pilot who was killed the night before in a motorcycle accident.

In some way it seems more unsettling, shocking, to lose a soldier this way than in battle, maybe because the latter is at least somewhat expected.

The commander’s wife called me on Sunday night to see if I was available.

Ordinarily, we don’t answer the phone on weekends but for some reason I answered.

They have been on base only three weeks and this is this Col.’s first command in Korea. I could empathize with having a rocky start.

It was kind of sweet to see how they were working together to figure out how to put the thing together, how to get support for the soldier’s spouse, for the men under his command, for themselves.

I guess it took me out of myself in a way that easing into the flow of being here wasn’t doing.

It made me grateful for enduring, however badly, the process involved in coming here, underlining the fact that just by showing up I lent some sense that they could offer a resource to the people affected that might help the with their grief process.

Day Next:

Today, day two as the Lone MFLC, I took part in a briefing program that had 39 or so soldiers and family members who are as new as me to Korea. It was good for me to sit in with them and hear the information that they were getting, not just for personal use, but as a way to know the range of perspective, but because I’m a freakin’ new comer too!

I need to know how to catch the bus to Seoul and the beach,

How to find the Super Gym (which I think all of Flagstaff could work out in at the same time), how to get a visa to Japan, etc.

I also got to meet the Command Sgt. Major, the person who makes all the things that the base commander, Col. Somebodyorother, wants to have happen, happen. This is important stuff in the life of an MFLC.

It is also important in the life of me, G.

The part who realizes I really can speak man to wo/man with these people in command and I’m not afraid, i.e. scared shitless, as when I was a 22 year old draftee private trainee grunt.

I hate to say it but in truth I often am old enough to be the father here.

Yeeooowwee!

You never know how the day will turn out!

Saturday I take a tour that will teach me how to use public transportation to get around Korea. This is a good thing. Costs 12000 yen. That’s 12 bucks in green backs or a little less, actually. I think we’ll get to Seoul and look around there for a few hours before returning to Camp Humphreys.

I think we’re going to something called the “electronic market”. I assume this is not a power plant and so maybe I will be able to find a camera that I want to buy. The truth is that Korea isn’t cheap, or at least isn’t much different than the US of A. Gas, e.g., $3.60, Whopper Value Meal - $7.80, actual Korean products – who the hell knows. An Army base is more like a little chunk of the States shipped over here only with Korean employees serving up the beef instead of Mexican Americans and Vietnamese.

And it turns out that the Buddhist chaplain is Vietnamese too.

I think this is kind of a Through the Looking Glass experience and I’m just high on something in the water.

What a job. Now I got to go get on Skype and call my supervisor for our weekly staff meeting.  There are about 14 of us on the call from various parts around South Korea. She’s in Texas someplace. I have no idea where Skype is. It will be 7:30 am Friday morning my time, 3:30 her time yesterday.  Please pass the mushrooms!