This is not your typical military story.
It covers my Republic of Korea Marine Corps story from September 28th, 2005 until now, late January 2006.
Hope you enjoy it.
Every bit you read is real.

A RoK Marine Corps Story.

“Is that the way you learned it?” asked Corporal Moon, all pissed off. I just stood there looking at the MOPP suit, unable to remember just how the **** I was supposed to open and fold the damn thing. I’ve always been bad with clothing and in a way, the MOPP suit is exactly that, clothing, and at this moment, we were going over the MOPP suit. The MOPP suit, for those not familiar, is that anti-chemical suit that you’ve seen a million times on TV… that suit that GIs wear during wartime when a chemical attack is suspected. The one with the hood and the gas mask and all. This wasn’t my first mistake on the MOPP suit. It was probably my seventh or something like that. “I think you need to ask yourself why you volunteered for the Corps.”
So why did I volunteer for the Corps? Sometimes it’s hard to tell you why I did something, but it’s easy to tell you why I didn’t do something. After all, it’s easier to say what it isn’t while referring to things which are familiar, than try to explain something completely new. At least that’s how the Hindus seem to explain things. It’s not this, but it’s not that… eventually you figure out what the hell they’re talking about. Getting straight to the point, it’s piss easy to tell you what I didn’t volunteer for.
You start in a harbor in Incheon. There are a few ferries that you can take… the Mugunghwa and the Democracy and there’s probably another I don’t know about. Then you go on a boat ride for 4 or 5 hours and you arrive at a pier on an island. The pier is on the east side of the island. From there you’ll be faced with MPs who will check your papers. Going past that, you go on the main road and head west and you’ll go through the main town of Jincheon. Go past that and you’ll find yourself another town which is much much smaller called Bukpori. Bukpori is where the headquarters element of the 6th Marine Brigade is. If you drive in, you’ll see a statue of the star and anchor of the Republic of Korea Marine Corps. You turn right here and you’ll be stopped by MPs who again will check your papers. Then you go through the check point and turn right again. You keep going straight until the cement road ends and you have mud. Make the first left turn on the muddy road and head uphill. You will see a brand new building. You can stop the car somewhere, get off and no doubt get mud all over your shoes. You can enter through the main door or the side doors… but let’s say you took the left most entrance. Go up to the 3rd floor. Get out of the stairway and into the main building. You have just arrived at the most screwed up unit in the RoKMC. Welcome to Chemical Support Company, 6th Marine Brigade.
I arrived at my unit on September the 28th, 2005, motivated, well trained and looking to be the best Private the unit has ever seen. A sacking of a Sergeant Major, a sacking of a Gunnery Sergeant, a sacking of three Staff Sergeants and the court martial of two enlistedmen later I could barely give a ****. And it’s not just me. I can see it in every new guy. They show up all alert and eager to be the best Private any one of us has seen. But it goes away soon. In every new Private I see the path I walked and in every Corporal I see the path I will walk.
It’s not just the junior enlistedmen. I could see it in the new NCOs as well. They first show up not knowing what to expect, perhaps with a few thoughts on ringing up changes. However, their start always included this remark, “Man, this unit is weird…” almost as if someone wrote a script about it. The new Sergeant Major said it, the new Gunny said it, and one of the more senior Staff Sergeants said it too. Weird as in it doesn’t seem like a military unit.

Whatever. I’m not sure how to tell the damn story so I’ll just go on telling it in small little topics. After all, what happened first, what happened last… it doesn’t matter.

The Captain

Our Chemical Support Company is led (officially anyway) by a Captain. He has 6 years of military service behind him but that is all he will ever get. His military career is finished and he is bound to leave the unit next month or the month after. Since I arrived at the unit on September 28th, 2005 we have had a Sergeant Major, one Gunnery Sergeant, three Staff Sergeants and two Lance Corporals sacked or court martialled. We had one big incident where the unit was caught totally shitfaced on Sunday. Our unit is made up of only 42 people and we’ve stirred more **** than the Anti-Aircraft unit and the Communications Battalion combined… we’ve stirred more **** than the three infantry battalions on the island… though it’d be a lie to say we’ve stirred more **** than all three combined. So naturally would you promote a guy who was in charge of that kind of unit? Hell no.
In movies and stuff you see the captain or the commanding officer all the time. Hell sometimes he’s the main character. Welcome to the real world. Or at least our unit. The Captain shows up only once in a while and most of it just to tell us to not beat the **** out of each other. He’s a unit reject. When we were cleaning out the captain’s office, one of the more senior Staff Sergeants showed up and ordered us to stop wiping the dust. “Let the ****er die of pneumonia,” he said.
Being on his way out, he doesn’t manage the unit. It’s not his problem anymore. And he blames us for his career demise and probably asks God or whoever or whatever he believes in what he did in his previous life to deserve such a disaster unit. But you know, the unit is his work. Our unit does nothing. Every day we just sit there waiting for something to happen like orders to clean out the trash of the Anti-Aircraft Company. Move rocks from this side of the parking lot to that side of the parking lot. In between that time we open up our MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) books and study. At least pretend to study. At first you study like hell. But soon enough you’ll just look at a page as if it had nothing on it and you’ll just daydream because it’s the same **** you’ve read at least 5 times already in the same day. So that’s my day. I wake up in the morning, barely, and we don’t run. Then we go eat breakfast and we come back and we don’t have anything planned for the day. Then we pretend to study, then we eat lunch. Then we come back and have nothing planned. We pretend to study. Then we eat dinner. We come back and clean the building. We have night inspection and go to bed. I think by now you’ll realize why our unit is nuts. We never do anything. Get any group of young people to do nothing for that long of a time and you will have a disaster on your hands.
So when we get to leave base for a few hours we get drunk. And we beat the **** out of each other. Eventually a lower ranking guy goes nuts and beats the **** out of a higher ranking guy.

Guard Duty

At night, through to the morning next day, we stand guard. We carry our weapons and guard a building. Inside the building is a PX (Post exchange… which is where you buy stuff like drinks). But this is how you know that you standing there is unimportant and makes no difference. We’re not armed with live rounds. We are given blanks. But there’s a thing about blanks. When you shoot them, something DOES come out. You can wound someone with a blank and when you turn it against your head and fire, especially that soft bit between your neck and chin, you can kill yourself. So they have taken out the firing pin. On top of that, my weapon isn’t a full rifle, it’s a carbine, which means it doesn’t have a solid butt stock. My weapon is the K-1 carbine. If you see it, it’s practically a submachine gun except it uses rifle bullets. Anyways I digress. So I guess I could just pistol whip the bastard. We carry also the bayonet sheath on our belts but we don’t carry any bayonets because they’re afraid we’ll kill each other. Out there in our guard post I am armed with a non-functioning weapon and foul language.
When people think of a guard post they usually think of a place where you stop cars, see who’s driving, ask for ID, jot it down, maybe check the underside of the vehicle for bombs… Not us. Car drives through and we salute it. Guy walks past we salute him. No questions, no ****. Of course there is a protocol about asking for the password but it doesn’t matter because no one knows what the password is. Almost every night we’ll have a few NCOs and officers saying they want to go to some other complex and want to know what the password is so they can get in without any issues. Thing is, if anyone out there KNOWS the password, chances are he’s a North Korean spy.
Guard duty is rather boring, but that’s universal for all units. You do things to make things less boring. For me, that would be slipping out of my post and going to the local grocery store... carrying my rifle and wearing my helmet. We stand guard in pairs and I am a guard leader, the junior most of the guard leaders but what it means is that I will always outrank the other guy who is standing the post with me. “Want anything to eat?” I’ll ask him. He’ll tell me maybe some chocolate bar or something and my stealth operation begins. I probably don’t need to tell you that if I get caught, I get a court martial but that only adds to the fun. But sometimes it’s too hard to stay hidden. So what I do is I bring a flash light. If you can’t hide, stand out like a damn light bulb and act like you know what the **** you’re doing. The plan is if I can’t hide, I’ll pretend to be looking for something. The conversation is canned. The guy (NCO or Officer) will ask me what the hell I’m doing. I’ll say we dropped a battery on the way in. The other Marine guarding the post knows this, so if someone asks him where I’ve gone, he’ll give the same answer. So I make it to the grocery store, or the bread store that’s right next to it and buy the goods. I ask, “excuse me, could you please check if there are any MPs outside?”
I come back with a plastic bag full of goodies but of course you can’t walk in the front gate with that stuff so I just shove the plastic bag through a hole in the fence. I enter the front gate empty handed and I go around the inside, pick up the goods and have a nice midnight party with the other guy. Of course you must not get caught eating or else, again it’s a court martial. One day though I really thought I was going to get it. I had a coke bottle in one hand, a chocolate bar in the other and my eyes looked into the nothingness between the two pillars that made the entrance to the Buddhist Temple on the other side of the road. Then I noticed something. Barely seven meters from me there they were, two MPs walking by on patrol. HOLY **** I thought. I am SO ****ing dead…. How the hell did I not see them? I had a clear line of sight of the road they walked on for a good 50 meters and yet I hadn’t seen them. But they didn’t see me. There I was with goodies in my hands and my mind a million miles away and they didn’t see a damn thing. Now don’t think they just let me go. If they catch us doing things like that, the MPs get bonuses. Catch enough and they get days added on their leave. But they walked by. The other Marine and I just looked at each other knowing just how close we were to total screwedness.
And it’s not like I never got caught at the grocery store either. One time I decided it was probably a good idea to just stop by before we actually made it to our post. It seemed quiet enough. So I had the other guy wait in the front of the store as I went in. The shop keeper’s slow pace irritated me but I got the job done and started to head out. Through the glass door I could see that the other Marine was missing and in his spot was another Marine with a different rank tag. Like the rank tags of a Gunnery Sergeant. ****!!!! I don’t know what I was thinking then but I just went into a form of denial. The denial that the Gunny was even there. I just walked out as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I could see the other Marine (a private) running his ass off. The Gunny started calling us. I pretended to not hear him but eventually he called us loud enough so I had to stop. But the brick shitting was short lived. “I’m not going to call the damn MPs so relax!” he said. He got us some bread to add to our goodies.

Fitness

You’d think that in the Marines there’s a big emphasis on personal fitness. This may be true in some units but in my unit… let’s put it this way. I cannot remember any time as a civilian where I exercised so little.
People give me a lot of crap for being old. I’m 24 years old. Most people I serve with are between 18 and 20. This may not sound big but it is if you think of it this way. When I was graduating high school, they were getting out of middle school. When I was ready to graduate college, they were getting into college. So they give me a lot of crap. But when we did run up a mountain (this happened only once), these guys who are 18 and 20 couldn’t keep up. Absolutely pathetic. I hate to sound like an old fart, but when I was 18, I was 1st alternate on my high school track team. I was MUCH MUCH fitter than I am now.
We did some Tae Kwon Do, but it was like… really really basic. I got my black belt but the test was piss easy and even though most of us failed actually, they let us pass anyway.
It’s not just fitness either. Mentality… you have to sit quietly for hours on end. There is no oorah or hard core attitude here. It’s just silence. We are not fit physically or mentally. I see how the new recruits go from determined and focused to unenthusiastic and bored real soon. We eventually become individual wastelands.

This Is My Rifle

We got to go to the firing range a few times because we had trials in late October. When you pick instructors, who do you pick? You pick the best right? Not here. In walks Staff Sergeant Moron who can’t hit more than 5 out of 20 teaching us new guys how to shoot. Just how on earth can someone who can’t shoot to save his life teach us how to shoot? Basically he just repeats the manual. But guess what? If you do it the way the manual tells you to, you will NOT hit the target. Yes I didn’t think this would be the case either but I did find out. Hundreds of pushups, squats and double digit laps around the rifle range later I realized that indeed the book is a load of ****. One day before the trials I decided I had enough and did it my way and hit 13 out of 20. I ended the trials as the unit’s better half of shooters.
No one really taught us how to shoot. Those who managed to hit the targets were in fact self taught. The Captain didn’t know how to teach us either. He just kept sending us around on laps and gave us lectures on how our attitude was all wrong and that we were going up not caring about hitting the target. Just how can that ever make sense? You go up there knowing that if you do ****, you’ll get to walk back to base with your rifle and that is after you’ve run laps, done pushups and squats. ****ing idiot can’t realize that perhaps these guys just don’t KNOW how to hit the damn target.
Anyways I managed to get it right. Next time I’ll do better now that I’ve finally found out the basic idea behind hitting the target.
But you know what? That wasn’t my rifle. Because the K-1 carbine has a worse accuracy than the K-2 assault rifle, I was given a staff weenie’s K-2 to go do the trials with to boost the unit’s scores. My own weapon, the carbine, still isn’t zeroed. If a war breaks out tomorrow and I have to fight with my carbine, I don’t know what to expect from it.

Going back to where we started. I didn’t travel half the ****ing world to land in this b******t but you know what? This is an experience. Everyone gets to read about the hard core, the best of the best, the shits of the shits. But no one ever gets to see shittiest spot of the RoKMC’s *******.
Imagine I ended up in a squeaky clean, well trained elite force. Now that would be a boring ass story. This is why I believe in God and believe me, he’s got a strange sense of humor. I actually wrote this email a while ago and I’m adding this last bit a day later but between the previous bits of this letter and this final bit I watched that movie Jarhead and nearly shat my pants when the Staff Sergeant Sykes guy said something I said on top of the Observation Point (top of the mountain really). Just where else on earth would you ever get to see **** like this?


That’s it for now. I guess I’ll write more later.