This One Time, In Korea...

By Kitty Pitman

Many United States Air Force veterans have spent a one year tour at Osan Air Base, South Korea. This memoir is a collection of short stories from a young airman stumbling her way through a year in a foreign country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kitty Pitman
• Release date: Jul 12, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452394251

Kitty Pitman

I'm a Unix System Administrator, a wife, a mother, a writer, and a photographer. Six years of my life were spent in the Air Force, and Uncle Sam was nice enough to pay for my Associate's and Bachelor's degrees.I've loved writing ever since I was a little girl, and my kids love reading my stories chapter by chapter as I write them. I hope you will too! My stories have a mostly light, mostly comical, sometimes dramatic theme that leave you saying "oooooooh" at the end.Please feel free to leave feedback on the stories you read. I'd love to hear from you!-- Kitty

Book preview

This One Time, In Korea…

By Kitty Pitman

Smashwords Edition

http://www.kitykity.com

Copyright 2010 Kitty Pitman

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I donated six years of my life to the United States Air Force, including three hundred and sixty-six days at Osan Air Base, South Korea. You count days while you're there. When you have less than a hundred days in country, you're a double-digit midget. When you get your orders to your next duty assignment, you write FIGMO diagonally across them with a fat black marker and post them on the door of your dorm room. I'll leave you to your Google skills to find out what FIGMO stands for.

My time in Korea was a time before the world wide web and cell phones, but not before microwave ovens and cable TV. We didn't have the luxury of spending hours on Skype with our loved ones; we were lucky to get one hour a month over a crappy phone line. So, with a lack of easy communication tools and things to do, we drank like fish--a pastime military members have enjoyed for generations.

I've been a civilian now for over ten years. Drinking is something that I very rarely partake in nowadays. On the rare occasion I do, stories pour out of me; and most of said stories start with This one time, in Korea... Most of the stories are light-hearted and funny, but occasionally there's the sad one or tear-jerker. Some of them are pages long, and some of them are a paragraph short.

The names have been changed to protect the (innocent?) and the blanks have been filled in where I don't remember the details. However, unlike a hash-naming where only ten percent of the story needs to be true, these stories will hit about ninety percent.

Enjoy,

Kitty Pitman

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The mode of transportation to Osan was a great big gray plane. I didn't know anything about planes. I had been in the service for about a year and a half, and I had no idea what I was walking into. All I knew was how to operate a telephone switchboard, the job they had put me on before I got my security clearance.

The flight to Korea was not fun. It was twelve hours long, and it was hot. Halfway through the first movie, the VCR jammed (this was about five years before DVDs), and that meant there were no more movies for the rest of the flight. By the time I got to Osan Air Base, I was worn out, tired, cranky, and hungry.

I got off the plane with who knows how many other airmen, onto a military base called Osan that I knew nothing about. All I knew was that a SSgt. Olsen was supposed to be meeting me there. He did.

About three feet from his green six-pack pickup truck, he lit up a cigarette. Do you smoke? he asked me.

No. For the most part that was true. I had stolen a single cancer