the corioblog

The Army has determined in its institutional way that morale is a good thing to keep high. As such, every so often, they let people out of work and take them on a field trip. The nature of the trip varies according to the circumstances–one of my friends was in the Old Guard previously, and they went out and qualified with muskets on a firing range for a day like this–so today, my company found itself packed onto a bus in civilian clothes and taken to the Seoul National Museum. It’s Korea’s Smithsonian: lots of historical and cultural artifacts and fine art. It’s a nice place to spend a day, though I’m not sure how much repeat value it really has.

As it happened, when everyone met at the recall point, the bus wasn’t there yet. That was ok; it wasn’t scheduled to depart for another half hour. There was a park nearby, so my platoon leader and I decided to walk through it and see what there was to find while waiting for the bus to show up.

Necessary background facts: my platoon leader is female, the only one in the company. As it happens, she’s cute. Still, she’s my direct supervisor, and is dating another captain: it would be a terrible idea to develop anything past a professional friendship.

We walked around for a little while, seeing the sights. The hilight was a nice misty waterfall from which it was very hard to tell that we were actually in the center of a city of 13 million.

We got back to the departure point two minutes before the scheduled time to leave. The bus was not there, and neither was the rest of the company. I was grinning as my platoon leader pulled out her cell to call the first sergeant and ask where they were. At her next words, I couldn’t help a guffaw:

“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

It was predictable, of course: since we had been seen walking into the park together, when the bus arrived, everyone else just got on and left. For most soldiers, innuendo will always overrule logic, particularly when it causes a minor inconvenience for someone else.

As for my companion, she was flipping out. This whole situation seemed a lot less amusing to her than it did to me, so she spent the next ten minutes on the phone yelling at the 1SG for leaving without making sure everyone was on board, making dire threats to PT everyone on the bus five minutes for every minute they arrived on base before her, and generally exuding rage.

Then it started raining.

They turned the bus around and came back to pick us up. An hour after that when we arrived, she was starting to see the humor in all of this.

Monday I start Green Platoon, so I’ll be spending all day every day making my way up to RL 1. This exempts me from all but the most urgent extra duties for the company. I suspect, however, that for the next month or two I’d have been safe from such things anyway. Cpt. F—— has some people in mind.