There were lots of ways to make easy cash and one of them was doing tasks other people disliked to do. In aviation, you use a lot of maps of the training area and to use these in a cockpit, you have to manage them. The best map management method I ever found was called the Australian Fold. You took the maps, a razor, a ruler, some rubber cement and a lot of patience trimming, folding and glueing maps together in sequential order. In Korea, our operations area covered 53 - 1:50,000 scale maps. These could be made into an Australian fold map book in about 3 hours (if you did it a lot) and I did it a lot, $50 a pop. I think 13 people gave up $50 for maps. To me it was easy money, time was something I had a lot of and an evening after chow in the pilot lounge putting a map book was a no brainer.
My other main source of side income in Korea was covering Staff Duty Officer. You came up for Battalion Staff Duty Officer (SDO) on the duty roster about once every 45 days. Most of the time when tasked with weekday SDO, people didn’t mind the duty much because they got the next day off. Friday and Saturday nights were different. People want to go out and be social, and depending on the night, and the tasked person's desire to do something else, I could get $50 sometimes $100 to cover a weekend SDO.
The Battalion SDO was someone to call for anything related to the battalion after normal duty hours. Rarely, did anything of any substance occur while you were on Staff Duty and for me nothing of any consequence ever happened. The biggest thing I had to deal with was a alarm going off at a secure building. I had the Staff Duty Non-Commissioned Officer (SDNCO, a sergeant) call the point of contact for that building and that person went out and reset the alarm, yawn. SDO duty was just long unending nights of perpetual boredom, but it was profitable boredom.
About Twice a year, you got the honor of Post Staff Duty Officer for Camp Humphreys. For the most part, it was the same as Battalion Staff Duty with one major exception, you had to count the prisoners. Camp Humphreys was the location of the I Corps stockade. At the beginning of your shift, you had to go to the Stockade and verify the prisoner count. Entering the stockade alone was a challenge, as you had to present your ID (which they kept while you were inside) and searched you for contraband before you could enter the building. Hearing that door close and lock behind you was a sobering sound.
The task itself was pretty simple, the Military Police (MP) Officer on duty provided you with the head count sheet, then you walked through and counted while he escorted you. The night I was there, there were six females, all in single cells, and 68 males mostly in dormitories. The prisoners all knew the drill and they all knew the needed to cooperate and get on with their routine. The whole process took less than thirty minutes, although it seemed a lot longer. Once we were finished, I was escorted back to the reception area and I was given back my ID and I left. I never wanted to return there unless I had post staff duty again.
Between money my wife sent me from home and my cash enterprises, I had enough money in Korea to meet my needs and still enjoyed myself as well as I could. One of the things I did to keep myself busy was join a bowling league. There was a small bowling alley on post, seems like it was 8 lanes but it could have been 4, I’m no longer sure. It was big enough and we bowled on Tuesday nights or something (American Bowling Congress and all) and it was fun, at least until I hurt my back.
All of my back-injury incidents have emerged from the most trivial of incidents. In this case, I leaned over a row of seats to high five a teammate coming out of the pit after a strike. It didn’t even seem to be anything major at the time, just a tiny “tweak” in the small of my back. I finished bowling, then as I started the quarter mile or so walk back to the Bachelor Officer Quarters (BOQ). It was at that point that I started to have some severe problems. I’d only gone a couple of hundred yards before I stopped and squat to relieve the pain. This went on every couple hundred feet until I made it back to my room. That night was just a blur of pain, and by 6 AM the next morning I was at sick call and seeing the Mr. Glenn Farris (CW2) the flight surgeon.
I was grounded (Big surprise, I could barely walk, much less fly) and he gave Flexeril and 72-hours quarters. I recall was waking up every eight hours, going to the bathroom, taking my next dose of pain medication and going back to bed for the next two and a half days. The next morning I went back to the flight surgeon and was put back on normal duty status but I was still grounded from flight duties. I was still hurting, just not as severely and I could walk and move with minimal discomfort. A few days later, I went to the gym to work out and I was using the hip abductor exercise machine, while adjusting the tension, I pulled hard on the lever and felt/heard a loud “pop” in my lower back and the pain was gone.
I was medically cleared to fly a couple days later and I didn’t have another back episode until several years later after I was at Fort Campbell. Boredom seemed to trigger me to exercise more during my year in Korea. I was not and never had been any kind of athlete and exercised under duress. But working out was something to do in my free time and that exercise kept me out of hack with the unit about my weight. Meeting my weight had been an issue my entire career and Korea was no different.
Like most pilots, I saw the flight surgeon fairly often for one thing or another and pilots were encouraged to have a good relationship with the flight surgeon (So we would actually go see one and not fret so much about getting grounded for something silly.) I became friends with Glenn and one day I sought him out because my shoulder was bothering me. (I think I strained it lifting something heavy while helping inventory the aviation parts stock) and for whatever reason it was bothering me.
Glenn started examining me and asking questions, and he started pressing around on my right shoulder. As I was talking about something he found the “Sweet Spot” and literally took me to my knees. Damn that hurt! From there he quickly diagnosed me with bursitis and gave me his “Cortisone Cocktail” (a combination of Xylocaine, Lidocaine and Cortisone) injection to remove the discomfort. It seemed to work pretty well and he never to repeat the procedure.
Glenn also introduced me to the local Friday Night poker party. Admission was a bottle of booze and the buy-in was $20. The booze was easy, as a fifth of liquor was about $3.50 the $20 for the buy in was a bit tougher and was part of the reason I had money making enterprises. (I didn’t make money at poker, but I found I could usually make $20 last most the night. Once it was gone, I was done playing poker as I was limited in funds and I didn’t like losing all that much anyway.
I fared better at the slot machines in the Officer’s Club. I limited myself to nickel slots and only one roll of nickels (two dollars a day.) I would play the entire roll and anything in the tray over two dollars went back into my pocket and I continued with that process until I either won another two dollars or I ran out of nickels and stopped playing that day. I think overall, I came out slightly ahead as I won $25 on a single play at least twice during my tour.
One of the nicest things about Camp Humphreys was it had a CH-47D flight simulator on post. During my in-processing, I had been introduced to the simulator supervisor MW4 Sandor Kelemen (aka the Raving Hungarian) Sandor (Pronounced SHANDOOR) was quite an imposing man and when we walked in his office he was on the phone giving some poor soul hell (hence his nickname) and once off the phone he quickly apologized to us about his rancor. It didn’t take us long to develop a friendship that we maintained for decades.
During the CH-47D grounding, I saw Sandor a lot as I had to maintain my currency in the simulator. I never got the opportunity to fly with him in an actual aircraft as our one mission (a fire bucket mission in an CH-47C) was called off as we were running up the aircraft. I’d often stop by and visit Sandor as we always had good conversations.
One of my first missions as a CH-47C qualified pilot resulted in my first entry of FlightFax published by the U. S. Army Safety Center. While flying a mission to a field site in a riverbed (Almost all our Korea field sites were a riverbed or a rice patty in winter) I was flying with CW2 Mark Marinelli as my Pilot-in-Command when we blew over a cinder block wall and small flagpole placing a load in the riverbed next to a school. It was published in FlightFax (Military publication of aircraft incidents) November 1989 as a Class C incident. “C-Series” – As aircraft approached a confined area with external load, it’s rotor wash blew down a small flagpole and damaged a cinder block wall around a tennis court.
Mark also had the prestige of being one of my TAC officers while I was in the Warrant Officer Entry Course (WOEC) a couple years earlier. It is a small world some days.
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