My South Korean Orphan

When you go through Basic Training in the US Army, the drill sergeants spend a lot of time telling you you'll probably get killed in combat. They did that anytime one of us screwed up something, like the "low-crawl pits".

The low-crawl pits were not really pits. They were straight, shallow trenches about three feet wide and fifty feet long filled with gravel and sand. To "low-crawl", you got down on your stomach on that gravel and pulled yourself along with your elbows and pushed with your knees. It was evidently really important that you keep your belly on the ground. The drill sergeants would constantly scream, "Crawl on your belly like a reptile", or "Crawl like an alligator."

Speed was important too, and every time they put us through the low-crawl pits, the drill sergeants would walk back and forth screaming at us to "get our fucking lazy asses moving" and that we "moved like old people fuck".

The thing was, the gravel presented a problem with speed. Since you had to keep your belly on the ground, the neck opening of your fatigue shirt acted like the bucket of a bulldozer and scooped up gravel and sand. That slowed you down. The other thing that slowed you down was the gravel was all smooth stones that mostly moved out of the way when you pulled or pushed. Going fast was like trying to run in waist deep water.

Trying to cheat to go faster would bring the wrath of a drill sergeant down on you and the inevitable, "You stupid motherfucker. If you raise your fucking ass up like that in 'Nam, some fucking gook in black pajamas is gonna blow your fucking shit away."

There were other things that would guarantee we'd be killed in combat, like being slow on the obstacle course, not being able to do as many pull-ups as the drill sergeants wanted, and not getting your gas mask on fast enough. That last one happened when we'd finished going through gas mask training and were standing in line waiting to eat lunch. One of the drill sergeants ran down the line with a gas canister taped to a long stick. I saw him coming and got my mask on in time, but about half of the guys ended up puking all over the place.

It was always, "Private, if you do that in 'Nam, your sorry fucking ass is gonna come home in a goddamned fucking aluminum box."

Most of the guys in my Basic Training company were guys between eighteen and nineteen who had enlisted right out of high school, and they thought all the talk about being killed in combat was funny. They'd sit on their bunks and joke with each other about who would get killed and who wouldn't. I was a twenty-one year old draftee and believed the drill sergeants were probably right.

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As it happened, I didn't have to find out like most of the guys in my company. They went to Infantry school and a lot of them ended up low-crawling through the jungle of Vietnam. I had an associate's degree in diesel mechanics and I think that was why I was sent to PLL school. It was either that or just the mysterious way the US Army decides anything.

"PLL" was the official acronym for "Prescribed Load List". The Prescribed Load List is the list of repair parts any unit is authorized to have, and it's a pretty detailed list that itemizes everything from major items like electronics modules down to nuts and bolts and repair tape. The PLL clerk is sort of like a parts and service manager at an auto dealership. He's responsible for the repair part inventory including ordering replacements for parts and supplies used, checking parts and supplies in and out of inventory, and managing service and repair records for all the tactical equipment in a unit.

It might seem as if that was an easy job, and it might be in today's world where everything is done with computers and bar codes. In my case, when I was assigned to a HAWK Missile battery in the mountains of South Korea, everything was done on paper. The filing system was huge and also came with it's own set of requirements.

Still, the job wasn't bad. I worked at a desk inside where I was dry, relatively cool in summer, and relatively warm in winter. My workweek was Monday morning to Saturday at noon, so I had my weekends off. I didn't have to low-crawl anywhere and it wasn't likely I'd get my ass shot off or my shit blown away.

The guys in our HAWK battery did a lot of things relative to relations with the local South Korean community. Most of those things involved the local bars and the women in them. When I first got to the battery, the business girls weren't very pretty or sexy and most of them didn't speak much English. They knew how to say "Me so horny, five dollah short time, ten dollah all night" while they were rubbing your cock through your pants, but any more conversation than that was pretty difficult.

After I'd been in South Korea for three months, those business girls started looking a lot better and I wasn't so concerned about having an intelligent conversation. By the time Christmas rolled around, I'd decided Suzy, a Korean girl about twenty who had really big breasts for her size, was about as sexy as they come.

No, I didn't act on that. Suzy had a major problem. About every two weeks, she failed the VD test the local doctor did and the medic observed and posted in every bar every week. I had no desire to get anything that wouldn't wash off while I was getting my rocks off. I did close my eyes every day in the john and jack off while imagining Suzy was riding my cock though.

The best thing our battery did for the community was to subsidize a South Korean orphanage. Because there have been Korean prostitutes servicing the American military since the Korean War, there have been a lot of babies born with Korean mothers and American fathers, and the US Army encourages the individual units to sponsor the local orphanage where most of those kids ended up.

Those kids ended up in orphanages because being of pure Korean blood was a big thing in South Korea and it was understandable. At one time, Korea was ruled by the Mongols and in the years before WWII, it was annexed by the Japanese. During WWII, many Korean women were forced to become "comfort women", the term the Japanese military used for forced prostitution. The inevitable result was babies with Korean mothers and Japanese fathers. Being of pure Korean blood was a sign you were a true Korean and not some half-breed.

This resulted in a strange Korean law. The law read that to be granted South Korean citizenship, a child must have a father who can prove he's Korean. That means any child born to a woman who isn't married or whose father isn't Korean can't be a South Korean citizen. The one exception to this was a foundling -- a baby abandoned somewhere. If a foundling was discovered on South Korean soil, he or she was automatically a South Korean citizen no matter the parentage.

People without South Korean citizenship were pretty much out of luck as far as things like education and a good job were concerned. As a result of this law, single mothers would abandon their children to guarantee those children were awarded South Korean citizenship and some promise of a good life.

The orphanage our battery sponsored was in Suwon and was run by a South Korean Methodist minister and his wife. Our battery collected donations every payday to help the orphanage along. The Christmas donation was pretty big, so we sent more guys to deliver it along with a couple gallons of ice cream and a big cake the mess hall baked. I was one of the guys who went along for the trip.

There were about thirty little kids at the orphanage. Most ranged from babies to early teens. One girl did catch my eye though. She looked older than the rest and she was beautiful, not beautiful like the girls in the village had started to look, but really beautiful. When I put the slice of cake on her paper plate, I told her she was pretty. She looked down at the floor and said in really good English, "No one has ever told me that before."

Well, she was beautiful. From what I'd seen of Korean woman, they tended to be a bit on the chunky side with pretty flat faces. This girl was slender but had a nice figure and her face had a perky little nose, sensuous lips, and wasn't flat at all. The topper was the really long, black hair that fell down her back.

I asked her name and she looked at the floor again.

"Kim Park Sun is what they named me when I came here. I was just a baby, so I don't know if I ever had another name."

She looked up and smiled then.

"Your uniform says your name is Hutchinson. What is your other name?"

I grinned because her smile was contagious.

"Peter...well, I go by Pete."

She held out her small hand.

"I am happy to meet you, Pete."

I didn't want to ask her age, but I really wanted to know.

"How long have you lived at the orphanage?"

She frowned then.

"You want to know how old I am. I will tell you, but I won't do what you're thinking about. I am nineteen and I have lived here since I was a week old."

Well, that was embarrassing. Park Sun was a lot smarter than I'd given her credit for being. I tried to redeem myself.

"I wasn't thinking about anything. You just seemed older than most of the kids here."

She smiled that smile again.

"Most leave when they are seventeen or eighteen and find jobs. I want to go to Hanyang University in Seoul, and I am working at the orphanage to earn enough money. I'm not sure what I'm going to be yet, but I know going to college will help me get a really good job."

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Over the next five months, I went to the orphanage every month to deliver the donation from the battery, and each time, while the Captain and First Sergeant asked the minister and his wife what they needed, Park Sun and I would talk.

I learned a lot about her during that five months. Park Sun had started taking care of the youngest babies at the orphanage in order to give the minister's wife more time with the older children. She also worked with the older children as well. Park Sun had learned to speak English in school, but her real grasp of the language had been learned at the orphanage.

The minister and his wife both spoke very good English and had served as interpreters right after the war. When Park Sun showed she was interested, they'd begun speaking only English with her. Park Sun told me that she knew speaking English was a key to getting a good job, so she was working with the little kids to improve their English.

Park Sun also did some of the cooking for the orphanage, and she did most of the laundry. When I jokingly said she was working too hard, she just smiled.

"Hard work is good. It makes you understand what life is like."

I made my last trip to the orphanage in May, and it was during that trip that I told Park Sun I was going back to the US on the first of June. She smiled and said I must be happy, but I saw a tear start to trickle down her cheek.

I didn't think much of it at the time because I was happy. I'd enjoyed some of what I'd experienced in Korea, but I couldn't understand a lot of what went on there. I mean, in theory it was a democracy, and yet, President Park had used a few incidents at the DMZ as an excuse to cancel the pending elections in order to keep himself in power. Nothing like that could ever happen in the US.

There had been a couple incidents, but they didn't have anything to do with the Korean government being overthrown. Every year, about a month before President Park's birthday, North Korean radio would start broadcasting that President Park would be assassinated on his birthday. That was just normal propaganda from the North and was in response to the South Korean radio stations that broadcast propaganda into North Korea. Nobody really took it seriously.

Another incident I remember was when a busload of men in uniforms was seen driving through Seoul. The initial statement from the South Korean government was that the men were North Korean agents on their way to kill most of the South Korean government and then take over. After the South Korean Army stopped the bus and killed most of the men on board, it was discovered that the men had escaped from a South Korean prison. The uniforms were really just their prison clothes.

Like I said, neither incident posed any threat to President Park, but after canceling the elections, he essentially declared military law. When I made the run into Seoul for parts, I'd pass half a dozen checkpoints along the way. There would be a couple South Korean Army soldiers standing in the road with rifles, and a little higher up would be a machine gun nest. I couldn't imagine how any country could stay free with that sort of shit going on. I couldn't wait to get back to the US.

I DEROS'd on the first of June, and once the wheels came up off the runway, I felt more relaxed than I had the whole past thirteen months. My orders said I was going home, and not to some stateside base to finish out the two years the draft required. Vietnam was winding down fast, and the US Army didn't need a bunch of draftees hanging around for another six months.

When I got to Fort Lewis, I spent about four hours getting mustered out and then took a bus to the airport. After spending another few hours at the USO in the airport, I was on my way to O'Hare and home.

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I got home safe and sound and started working as a diesel mechanic again, but the job just wasn't the same. I decided the only thing that had really changed was me. My thirteen months as a PLL clerk had shown me that it was pretty nice not coming home smelling like diesel fuel and motor oil and with fingernails that refused to come clean.

I needed to get my ass back in school to get out of that job, and since the GI Bill would let me do that at a pretty low cost, that's what I did. I applied at MTSU, got accepted, and started studying for a degree in mechanical engineering.

There were some good things about being in college. I was over twenty-one so I didn't have to live in the dorms. I got a part-time job working at one of the university engineering labs and could afford a tiny little apartment. I was my own boss with nobody to blame but me if I screwed up.

The classwork was hard, especially some of the math, but it was also interesting and rewarding when I figured out something. The applied mechanics classes were fun. The thermodynamics, not so much, but I managed to pass them.

Part of the reason I was able to pass the tough classes was my age. I was old enough to understand that MTSU didn't owe me any special treatment if I was having problems. It was my responsibility to ask the professor or TA's for help. Some of the younger guys didn't do that. They lasted a couple semesters and then dropped out.

My age was also responsible for the bad part of college. I was sort of caught in the middle between giggling freshman girls who were eighteen or nineteen and upper class girls who would never lower themselves enough to date a freshman. As a result I spent four years studying and only got laid twice. Neither relationship lasted more than a month, and that was my fault. Without realizing it, I'd become what they called a "nerd", meaning I was too smart and too anal-retentive for a woman with a free spirit.

Once I had my degree, I looked for a job and found one with a small automotive parts company in Gallatin, Tennessee. I was what was called a manufacturing engineer there. What that means is instead of designing products, I designed the machines and other equipment that makes those products.

I liked that job a lot because every day was something different. I was either designing equipment to produce the next product or redesigning equipment to make it more efficient. My college design classes had all been about using the least amount of material to withstand the maximum stress applied. It took me a while to get my head around the concept of "make it so you can run into it with a forklift and it'll still work", but I managed.

What I didn't manage to do was find a girlfriend. There were a lot of women working in that plant, but most of them were already married. The women who weren't married didn't seem to me to be my type. It wasn't that they weren't pretty or sexy, because a lot of them were. I just couldn't imagine spending the rest of my life with them. Instead of dating, I poured myself into work and got a couple promotions and bonuses for my effort.

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It wasn't until Samsung Electronics built a plant in Austin, Texas that I even considered finding another job. I was happy where I was, making enough money that I could live comfortably, and I was close to home. That all changed the year the Samsung plant was finished.

I was used to getting calls from headhunters, the people who would find you a job at no cost as long as you stayed in that job for at least a year. The company who hired you paid the headhunter about ten percent of your salary the first year. If you quit before that year was up, you had to pay the company back.

Anyway, the headhunter said a foreign company had built a new plant in Austin, Texas, and was looking for experienced manufacturing engineers to oversee installation of equipment in the plant and to train the people who would operate that equipment. They had their own engineers who would be there too, but since the operators would mostly be Americans, they wanted engineers who spoke English as a first language.

The American auto industry was going through some hard times in the early 1980's. American made cars had a reputation for costing more and having lower quality standards than the cars being imported from Japan. To improve quality, the Big Three auto companies imposed strict quality testing on their suppliers and at the same time, lowered what they were willing to pay suppliers for parts.

What that meant was parts suppliers, already working with razor-thin profit margins, saw their costs go up and their income go down. My current company had basically stopped all salary increases and several of my fellow engineers had left for more money. The company was being really slow at replacing them in order to save salary costs. That meant I'd been assigned more work than before.

I didn't mind working on other equipment, but I did mind the extra hours. To keep up, I was working twelve-hour days during the week and half days on Saturday. I updated my resume and sent it to the headhunter.

The company turned out to be Samsung and I was impressed by several things. The salary was more than I was making, and their production processes were state of the art. Samsung seemed to expect a lot from their engineers, but so did my current company. My current company just didn't want to pay for the effort. There were a lot of things for a single guy to do in Austin. Texas would be warm most of the year too.

I did my best during the interview, though I had to ask the Korean interviewers to repeat some of their questions because a couple didn't speak English all that clearly. At the end of the day, I thought I'd done OK. I flew back to Nashville thinking my chances were better than even.

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Two weeks later I got a call from my headhunter. He said Samsung wanted to hire me and asked when I could start. That afternoon, I gave the department manager my two-week's notice. The weekend in the middle of that two weeks, I flew back to Austin and rented an apartment. The Monday after my last day, I stuck around during the morning while the moving company loaded my stuff into their van, and then drove to Austin.

It took the rest of that week to get settled in, and on the following Monday I reported to my new boss ready for work. He showed me where my desk would be and then gave me a bunch of stuff to read about Samsung. I'd figured on that. Most companies have some sort of orientation they put new employees through.

My first project was a new assembly line, and my manager said I'd have a Korean engineer working with me who was currently in Seoul. The assembly line was being built in Seoul, and I and the Korean engineer would stay with the assembly line until it shipped to Austin so we could see how it was put together and how it worked. That Friday, I got an envelope with a plane ticket to South Korea and a hotel reservation in Seoul. I left that Sunday morning at five-thirty in the morning.