How much beer can one man drink?
Thanks to Greywar for inspiring me to relive the joy and pain of some wonderful and horrible nights in my mind. I've been inspired by him to share a few with everybody. I've changed all the names to protect the guilty (as there were no innocents in these events......ever...).
Feb. 19, 1996 was Seol-nal, which is the Lunar New Year holiday in Korea. To celebrate, one of our colleagues, SGT Stocky, decided to invite several of us over to his house off-post to party. He was married to a Korean woman (who he met oddly enough while stationed back in the US), and they had a newborn daughter. The attendees were: SPC Surfer, SPC Shag, PFC Pacman (who had just arrived in-country), SPC Rockstar, SGT Nord, and a few others that my alcohol damaged brain cannot seem to recall. We all showed up at SGT Stocky's house, beer and liquor in hand, to find a huge spread of food that his magnificent wife had prepared for us. We all sat around, ate some food, and started drinking. Meanwhile, his wife decided that she really wasn't up tolerating so much testosterone, so she left to go on-post to do some shopping and run errands (although she left the baby with us.....probably not the brightest idea, but fortunately nothing horrible occurred this time around).
We drink for about an hour or so, and then SGT Stocky got a phone call from his wife, and she is in a panic. Apparently she lost her wallet in a taxi on-post. This is a MAJOR problem overseas, due to the controlled items in a normal wallet - military ID card & ration control card in particular. So, she didn't want to come off-post, since she more than likely would not be able to get back on later without her ID. So, SGT Stocky informs us that he needs to leave to go on post to straighten everything out, and we will all have to un-ass his abode. Apparently he didn't trust half a dozen or so half drunk GIs in his house with no "adult" supervision.
So, we all depart the house, remaining beer in hand, and decide where to go next. A few people decided to return to the barracks to finish the pre-"ville" warmups. I'm not positive, but I think that one or two decided to head straight out to the clubs in town. Four of us decided that we did want to finish off the beer we brought (a whole case of 24 left), but we didn't want to schlep the case all the way back to the barracks, just to walk all the way back out to town later, especially since it was February in Korea, so the temperature was somewhere between hypothermia-inducing and testicle retracting. So, SPC Shag, SPC Rockstar, PFC Pacman, and myself went to a local playground where we could stand around and quickly dispose of the remaining beer. It took the 4 of us about 45 minutes to dispose of 24 beers.....remember, this was after already drinking a few at the house earlier. This was the beginning of the end......