(This young American is on the only side of this little bridge you would want to visit. The other side of it is in North Korea. Taken at he Joint Security Area (JSA) in 1980 by some kid named ‘Socotra.’)
I am sure you want to talk about the Electoral College this morning, and the election of former Vice President Biden as the next President of the United States. I watched the acceptance speech, and President-Elect Biden (I think that is what he is now) cleared his throat only 14 times before Doctor Biden led him offstage. It was unifying, you know?
Anyway, I don’t expect the thrills and chills are over. There is still the matter of the Executive Order Mr. Trump signed just after the 2018 voting adventure, and the coming Georgia Senate races, and the Joint Session of Congress the day after that election, which promises to have even more excitement. What a grand year this has been!
When my attention has occasionally been drawn from the flat-screen at the end of the Great Room at the farm, I have been busy. Rather than disputing elections, I passed the plague time unearthing some strange things on the external hard-drive to the old computers. One of them struck me- an attitude-filled account of a young man who was apparently assigned to a military tour in the Republic of Korea. He seems prone to mild hysteria, and it is fun to visit him. He has no idea what is to come!
His story is in The Snake Ranch Papers. It is one of those things that has followed me around since 1981. There was a time when triplicate forms were used to provide “carbon” and “file” copies to normal correspondence. That limited distribution to a very small group and provided safety that would have saved at least one career I know of over use of that “reply to all” button on the screen.
But that is the generation we were, and the generation we are now. The manuscript was in sheets of that annoying thin paper with the scars at the top where the copies were separated. They were in a manila folder, probably the one kept under the little desk in the six-man hooch on South Post, in the Yongsan Military Garrison in Seoul.
The sheets were fed through one of the big copiers we used back in the old days and were rendered as digital ‘portable document files’ (.pdf). They were stored on one of those thin square floppy discs that transferred the digital version across the last dozen home computers I have managed badly across fifty or sixty upgrades and changes to the operating system, Word to Mac.
So that was then. In the Snake Ranch lived a cocksure little snapper like the author of these letters. I came across them while trying to find all the pieces of my Great Grandfather’s trip to Europe in 1903, before the astonishing madness of the 20th Century played out. I had transcribed them from his paper and thin ink lines to digital a couple decades ago, and it was almost ready to go with all the photos and postcards scanned in. Strange little project, but I never met the man, and thought his notebooks stuck moldering in one of the boxes of Mom and Dad’s stuff might be worth saving for his great-great-great-children.
Then I ran across this. On the ship, I had written an odd thing called “Nick Danger, Third Eye.” It was a small shipborne world, the one before satellite communications. Having nothing else to read, it was mildly popular on USS Midway. When I washed up in Korea I took the experiment in writing a little further, and invested in an actual typewriter. It was a cool thing, electric, and until the “m” key flew off, I began to try to tell stories about what was happening around me.
I don’t know how many Team Spirit exercises Midway did when I was aboard. I only remember one of them, a big-deal combined-arms exercise off the SE coast of the Republic. Marines storming ashore, jets roaring from the ship, ROK infantry simulating hunting down North Korean commandoes, that sort of thing. But landing in the middle of Seoul with a military coup underway was interesting, as was the rioting down in Kwang-Ju Province, and the usual tunneling and infiltrating under surveillance flights of SR-71s (Boom! BOOM!) and satellites whizzing unseen in low earth orbit.
Anyway, the kid who was using his typewriter to bitch about life is a little hysterical for my taste these days, and living harder than I can even imagine. It was an interesting year. Why don’t take a PX cab over to the Hooch on South Post and enjoy a year of your life somewhere you had never intended, but determined to enjoy to the extent possible.
You haven’t lived until you have visited the gigantic piles of round fresh cabbage being sold so the Capital can lay in a good season of kimchi for all hands. Or be an honorary Junior MP in a riot. But that is all in here, told by a wise ass for maximum effect and drama. And long ago. In a place far away.
If I can figure out the .pdf conversion process, you will see it in my book selection on Kindle. I will let you know how it goes!
– Vic
Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com