I'm Back! On Iraq!

Finally figured out how to get back on my blog site, and building this up again will at least give me something to do during Christmas vacation besides donating one of my kidneys to my ailing neice...

Speaking of Iraq, sometimes it seems as though we in Korea are right next door. We are, as some of you may know, daily subjected to the presence of thousands of U.S. soldiers, from the street point of view one sees mostly the grunts in the bars of Hong Dae (my neighborhood, the 'Ginza'/'Times Square' of Seoul) against military regulations (seems there was a knifing incident a while back that put this neighborhood off limits to them )

So the other night I was out with my partner in grime, Regan the Kiwi...Being young and foolish, he loves to hang out in a place he refers to as 'The Dirty Bar'. Actually, the official name of the bar is "The Bar" if one is to believe the sign hanging over the door. Like most bars in this area (actually in the neighboring 'Ginza' district) it is small, dingy and dirty. I don't know what makes this bar any dirtier than the rest, but it certainly qualifies for the name.

The dirty bar is usually full of English Teachers and their girlfriends, English Teachers looking for girlfriends, and girls looking for English -teaching boyfriends. Did I leave any permutations out? Oh yes, and the aforementioned, illegally trespassing soldiers.

I don't normally 'fraternize' with anybody with a crewcut or a near-mohawk, but this night, something struck me about these three lanky, gawky, insecure types who had somehow put their testosterone behind them long enough to have a short conversation.

They were from Minnesota, New Mexico, and New York, probably from poor families. They seemed, like most cannonfodder, a little nervous but generally clueless about what lay ahead of them. I plucked up my nerve and confirmed that they were being sent to the battlefields of Iraq.

For a moment, I almost felt as if I were living in the era of Vietnam, and watching the innocents about to be shipped off to the slaughterhouse, where one either ended up becoming a butcher onself, or another parcel for the meathook...

I touched my forehead and then theirs and said "there. I've loaned you my angel. Just try to remember that the people trying to kill you are just that...people who just want you to leave their country." I didn't say it exactly like that of course, but to preserve our mutual face we didn't need to mention the unmentionables. They were at that very minute technically AWOL, because of the military proscription on this neighborhood - so both of us decided not to throw stones at eachother's glass hovels.

2 days after that I was in the fleamarketplace and looking at piles of rubbish that people thought was worth selling, and came across a whole box (about 25 kilos) of 'medallions' (like medals without ribbons) that had been minted for the u.s. army - god knows how they give them out, in what sort of ceremony - for different companies and battalions, with all of their arcane insignia and pseudo-neo heraldry. We found several from Iraq, with the map of Iraq on the background, and 'Operation Iraqi Liberation' printed on the edges with the date 2003.

Jeez. The war is old enough for its detritus to end up in a Korean flea market junk pile. That's not just tragic, it's weird.

nuff for now.