Chapter 3: Downtown

The exercise ended on Thursday evening, which meant all day Friday was spent cleaning up and putting the equipment away, maybe fix a few broken airplanes and it gave Wedge time to attend a lot of briefings. He remembered being briefed by a doctor that the best you can do is ensure that your Korean meal downtown was deep fried, because bacteria won’t survive a bath in 350° oil.

“How was your meeting with Colonel Walker?” Roxie asked Wedge. They had filled bowls with all kinds of ingredients and were standing in line at the NCO club waiting for their chance to hand their mix over to the cooks.

“He was intense. I guess the weapons flight on the previous rotation was weak and the thirty fifth took the commanders trophy. He let me know that he was going to be keeping an eye on me.” Unlike other overseas assignments in the Air Force, Kunsan was one year, so people rotated in and out regularly. Each group was known as a rotation, and the fighter wing kept track of these rotations.

Roxie gave him a smile as their bowls were turned out on to the large round grill and the cooks went to work. “You didn’t beat him up, did you?”

“I don’t go around beating people up.”

“Why not?” she said, “you’re big enough,” and she gave him a hip bump.

“I’m a lover not a fighter and besides, he’s my commander, he makes sure I get paid.”

“Lover?” Roxie acted surprised. “I don’t see no woman on your arm, and you only have one picture hanging in your room.”

“That’s my sister.”

“Kinky!” Roxie gave Wedge a wicked grin that he shook his head at. They got their meals and headed back to their table. “What are you doing this weekend?”

“I don’t know, what is there to do on the weekend around here?”

“Go shopping.”

“Do I look like a guy that enjoys shopping?”

“Everyone enjoys shopping, come on, it’ll be fun.”

Wedge really wanted to re-arrange his room and read a book, but he really enjoyed spending time with Roxie, so he wasn’t too surprised when he heard himself say, “Sure.”

The next morning was a typical Korean morning. It was still. There wasn’t a puff of a breeze, fog rolled in off the yellow sea and the peaceful silence almost screamed, “Get back in bed!” Korea is known as “The Land of the Morning Calm,” and it lived up to its name. After a couple of pop-tarts, Wedge stepped out into the hall and tapped on Roxie’s door. She opened the door with a toothbrush in her mouth and waved him in, then she leaned over her sink and finished brushing her teeth.

“Where are we going shopping? I need a griddle,” he asked.

“We’re going downtown but get your griddle in the BX when you get your bike.” They walked over to the NCO club and exchanged some dollars for Korean won and waited for a bus that would take them downtown to Gunsan city.

Soon they were on a comfortable bus and heading downtown. The driver was an old Korean man who played Korean opera on his cassette player as he drove. He was trying to saturate the Americans with Korean culture, but to Wedge, who likes opera, it was a recording of cats that were tossed in a drier.

As they passed through the Korean countryside, Wedge saw things he never saw before, terraced rice fields, fishermen setting up fish nets in small ponds, farmers cultivating the edges of the road and ditches. They saw small villages that had a wall around them like a medieval fortress, and everything seemed new and alien to Wedge. Roxie didn’t admit that it was new and alien to her, too. She’s only been there a month and a half longer than Wedge, yet her meager experience set her above him.

During the journey, their hands touched, and Roxie said, “Don’t be getting ideas so quickly, I’m bringing you along as a shopping cart.”

“I can live with that,” lied Wedge. He really liked her, but she efficiently slammed the door in his face. Wedge slid into a funk and turned to the window, ignoring the dark-skinned beauty at his side. He watched a “frog sticker” (it’s what the American GIs called a Snowy Egret) picking the shallows of a rice paddy looking for breakfast. Wedge was a big, powerful man. He wasn’t handsome, but he wasn’t ugly, his features were rough, he was described once as a well-dressed steel worker. Women gravitated toward him because he could do things for them, from changing a flat tire to moving a couch. His last girlfriend took him to a party and introduced him to her friends as her personal moving company. He left the party quietly, and she didn’t notice until she was ready to leave.

“Come on Wedge, suck it up, this is not the first time you’ve been friend zoned,” he told himself. “It won’t be the last time either, so pull your head out of your ass and enjoy the day.”

Roxie knew that she, as a woman, was a rare commodity on Kunsan Air Base, but she didn’t show it. For the lonely American GI, there were a few enlisted females on base, most of them were married. There were plenty of Korean women around, but they didn’t speak English very well, other than, “You buy me juicy drink?”

When Roxie first got to Kunsan, she had a small cloud of black guys hanging around her, watching her every move. Soon fights broke out over whose bitch she was, and a white co-worker was threatened and told to keep his hands off “their bitch.” The next day at roll call, the cloud of her “owners” was standing on the sidelines waiting for her to finish. Some of them didn’t even belong in the building.

“Sergeant Dawson, do you have anything?” asked her NCOIC.

“Yeah! I just want you people to know, I’m not anyone’s bitch, and you mutts sniffin’ around, you ain’t got a hope in hell because there’s one thing that I want that you ain’t got, a pussy!”

Roxie wasn’t a lesbian. She just wanted to be left alone and not treated like someone’s bitch. But she wasn’t insensitive either, and she realized she said something that hurt Wedge. “Hey,” she said as she elbowed him. “You ok going shopping with a lesbian?”