Back in the 1980s when I was in the Marines and stationed aboard a Navy ship traveling around Asia and the Pacific, hitting several different countries over six months of deployment. When we pulled into Pusan, South Korea for a week of field exercises with the ROLMC, the Republic of Korea Marine Corps, known to us colloquially as the Rok Marines. All the Marines disembarked from the ship and went to the Rok Marine base near a village about 20 miles from Pusan to spend a week on the mud and sleeping under the stars, just the way we like it. When the training was over, we hiked a few miles to a tent city further inland, from which we had a few days of liberty (free time, to civilians), and many of us hit the local town for wine, women and song.
I, however, had different plans. I went to my company commander (C.O.) and requested permission to travel all the way across the country to a small US Army outpost north of Seoul, the nation’s capital, to see my elder brother, who was stationed there. I explained to the C.O. that since I had joined the Marine Corps three and a half years earlier, I had not seen my brother at all. My brother had joined the Army a couple of months after I had joined the Marines, and the few times that I had gone home on leave, he was always away at some Army base somewhere, the furthest being in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt. This was my third time in South Korea, but previously, my brother had not been there, he had just arrived in South Korea a few months earlier. I reasoned with the C.O. that South Korea was the first place where my brother and I had been closest to each other in years, and neither of us knew when and where such an opportunity might come up again.
(My brother would be in South Korea for at least another year, then transferred to parts unknown, while on my side, after my unit’s overseas deployment, I would rotate from shipboard duty back to my permanent base in Hawaii, where I would be for another two years.)
The distance to the Army base concerned the C.O. because once liberty ended, my unit would embark on the ship again and head for the next country on our schedule. There was absolutely no way I could miss that ship without jeopardizing my entire career: the infraction known as missing ship’s movement is an extremely serious offense in the maritime services, to which the Marine Corps belongs. If for whatever reason I wasn’t aboard ship when she weighed anchor, no force on Heaven nor Earth could help me.
The C.O. asked me if I wouldn’t rather carouse with my buddies in the local town for two or three days instead of going on a wild goose chase all the way up to the DMZ. I told the Captain that chasing women and buying souvenirs took a back seat to seeing my brother. Heck, I had been in South Korea before, so it wasn’t new to me. I also assured him that I had already checked at the local train station, and I could make the trip in 9 hours, spend the next day with my brother, travel back to Pusan in 9 hours, and be aboard ship hours before she sailed (ok, steamed).
I added, “Oh, and by the way, Sir, the next train leaves this station in a couple of hours, just in case you’re interested in letting me go.” Skeptical as he was, the Captain took into consideration not only how impressed he was that I had mapped out a detailed plan, but also what type of Marine I was; a good Corporal with a spotless record. He granted my request, but not without reminding me of the consequences of missing movement. I could say goodbye to my Corporal stripes and spend the rest of the deployment in the ship’s brig (jail) starting out with a ride on the “grain and gravy train” (a 3-day diet of nothing but bread and water).
I thanked him, hurriedly took off as if I had been shot from a 155mm artillery piece and made it to the train station just in time. Being a small town, no one spoke English and all the signs were in Korean. Luckily, I had the Pusan train schedule in hand, which was printed in both languages, I showed it to the ticket agent and she understood. Being a civilian train, only South Korean money was accepted. I changed my greenbacks for their currency, the Won and bought the cheapest ticket available. First mistake.
South Korea is crammed full of Americans, and there are numerous US Armed Forces installations dotted all over the country. Except on my route, rural farm country. The ticket I bought was the equivalent to flying coach on an airplane. Half of my fellow passengers carried chickens and goats and pigs and sheaths of corn or barley or sacks of fertilizer, etc. None of them spoke English. Darkness fell, and along with it, so did the winter temperatures. My ticket had me in an unheated car, and everyone was bundled up and carried thick blankets to keep warm except guess who. The further north we went, the colder it got. The conductor announced each coming station, but did so in rapid-fire Korean. I tried to count the stations we stopped at and compare them to my printed schedule, but it turns out that my copy only showed the major stations, not the podunk ones, of which there were many. I soon lost count. The train only stopped for a minute or two each time, so I couldn’t get off to see if I could ask questions. I tried to engage with the onboard conductor, he acknowledged my destination circled on my schedule, pointed at his watch and just smiled and said something that must have been “Nine hours, Joe.” I tried to ask him if I’d be changing trains along the way or just stay on this one. He didn’t understand me. Smile, “Nine hours, Joe.” And then he was gone.
About two hours into the trip, in addition to freezing, I began to get very hungry and very sleepy. I hadn’t eaten in about four hours, but I hadn’t slept in about eighteen hours. I couldn’t go to sleep because I might miss my station. The need for food, mixed with the fragrance of goat hides and fertilizer bags, didn’t exactly inspire much of an appetite, but I was still starving. In coach, there was no dining car, only wooden seats and a unisex “bathroom“. The latter consisted of a canvas curtain at the end of each car and Korea’s infamous squat hole at floor level with the outline of two feet on either side of it. The only thing that smelled worse than goat/fert was that bathroom. It seems that the swaying and rocking of a speeding train doesn’t promote the best in aiming skills for people who have their garments wrapped around their ankles and are perched over their target.
Every few stations or every few hours, the conductors changed. None of the new ones had any patience for me, I was on my own. I couldn’t wrap myself into tightly enough a ball to conserve my body heat. All outwardly exposed areas, even though I was fully dressed, congealed immediately. I cursed my brother’s name for joining the danged Army and not the Marine Corps, because we fought mainly in the tropics. He could have had the decency to be stationed in Guam or Belize or Panama, or Fort Huachuca, Arizona. I would continue to curse him for every frostbitten toe amputated from me, and every hour of physical therapy relearning how to walk.
Four hours into the trip, many passengers got off at their stations, while fewer and fewer new passengers boarded. Boredom, hunger, anxiety about missing my stop, sleepiness, and freezing all soon took their toll on me and I drifted off to sleep at some point. I startled myself awake to find I was alone. My watch told me I was five and three quarter hours into the trip. My ears, fingers and toes were black and numbed by cold. Wait, I digress: they’re block from birth, the jury is to disregard that inference. Slowly venturing forward a car at a time, after a couple more coach cars, I discovered a luxury car! It had thick padded upholstery seats in little booths, windows that kept the air out, a real bathroom, but more importantly, it was heated! There were no passengers nor conductor around anywhere, so I found a seat assignment with the same number as my ticket, albeit different car. I snuck into the booth and curled up in the corner like a little baby. The newfound heat and the rocking of the train soothed me, and once again, I was sleeping, but blood flow was seeping back into my dry ice extremities, so I didn’t care.
Then it happened. I was suddenly awakened by an angry elderly Korean woman yammering at me, waving her ticket in front of my face and pointing at the seat number. I was in her seat. She had a small crowd of other passengers behind her, staring at me as if I was high theater to them. Everyone was going off in Korean, surely about the audacity of stowaways. With no plans to return to The Freezer Express, I feigned language-barrier ignorance as I pointed at my ticket number. She wasn’t having it. Glancing at my watch, it was about eight hours into the nine-hour trip. If I could stay there until the end, my brother would not have to identify a frozen cadaver at the destination. I moved to one of the other four seats in the booth, but that didn’t make her any happier, so she summoned the conductor, who angrily escorted me back to the walk-in freezer, found my assigned seat, and planted me there. By then, loads of passengers filled every car.
Dead tired, starving, icicled, and the object of a thousand staring and glaring Koreans’ eyes, I made it to my station an hour later. Getting off the train, more like stumbling off of it, there was a food stall nearby; I ate whatever they were selling and had a nice hot drink. Being so close to US installations once again, English accompanied the Korean on signboards, many of the Korean people around me spoke English, and there were Americans around too. Transportation to my brother’s post would whisk me away within half an hour.
Skipping over the intended visit with my brother is a whole other adventure tale of its own, and due to the length of this one, o will only recount it upon request of any of you who want me to write it, even just one person. One hint is that it certainly includes some unexpected difficulties. In conclusion of this one, however, I will say that the return trip to Pusan began at about 6 am, so no freezing nighttime temps, I splurged and bought an upgraded ticket for better accommodations, I carried with me enough food for a Napoleonic campaign, I had magazines to stave off boredom, and I arrived as planned with plenty of time to make it aboard ship and salvage my military career. The Captain didn’t even blink an eye when he saw me; he had full faith in Corporal Randall D.
[NOT edited for typos.]
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(damn)
I can commiserate.
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Kittigate 