Winter In Korea During An Oil Embargo

One of the most miserable places to be during the 1973 oil embargo was in a US Army Quonset hut in the middle of a Korean winter.

Back then, I was stationed at Camp Page, Korea, home of the 4th US Army Missile Command, the last Honest John rocket unit (I gotta tell ya, if you’re gona be in the Army and you hafta fight a war, rocket artillery is the job to have:  You hide behind a mountain and shoot at somebody 17 miles away).  Temperatures hit -50F with the wind chill factor.

The Quonset huts were old and lacked any insulation; heat was provided by space heaters -- big metal barrels that burned diesel oil.

Each hut got four heaters, and each heater burned 7 ½ gallons of fuel a night.  

When the embargo hit, the Army put us on strict rationing:  Only three of the heaters could be fuel and then only with 5 gallons of oil, not the full 7 ½.

This meant come 3 or 4 am the fire died, and when the fire died, the temperature plummeted.

So we applied some ingenuity.  Most of the huts were divided into three bays; a big one in the middle taking up half the space, two smaller ones at each end.

We moved all our bunks into the big middle bay and our lockers into the outer ones and pooled the 15 gallons allotted each hut and divided it among the two center space heaters, giving each a full 7 ½ gallons to get us through the night in toasty comfort.

We thought we were pretty slick…but we hadn’t banked on this lieutenant.

I’ve written about this bozo before, how he pissed off everybody in every unit with the misfortune to get him, until at last a sneaky transportation sergeant got him to sign for a long since stolen generator and that ended his military career.

The oil embargo came before that, and indeed was one of the many things this poindexter did (say, that’s a good name for him:  Lt. Poindexter) to irritate everybody in the headquarters company.

Lt. Poindexter saw our solution and decided to score some points with the brass by cutting our fuel allotment to 10 gallons instead of 15.

We protested, but it did no good.  Our warm, toasty solution got cut back and now we not only crowded all int soldiers in that barracks into half the available space, but we had to dress in the icy cold outer bays.

We learned three lessons from this:

• First, to follow the old Army adage, never volunteer for anything.  We thought by being clever we could obey the rationing order and still keep ourselves warm in the manner desires.  Lt. Poindexter tossed our sacrifice and effort aside to kiss up to the brass.

• Second, we troops learned we valued ourselves and each other far more than our superiors did.  We willingly crowded together so all could keep warm; Lt. Poindexter only saw values in claiming credit for our ingenuity -- which to be perfectly honest, we didn’t care about so long as we stayed warm -- and cheerfully inconvenienced us to make himself look good.  While it may have done that, it did nothing to engender respect, trust, or loyalty for him among the troops.

• Third, payback’s a bear.  Lt. Poindexter, in currying favor with his superiors at our expense, set himself up for some heavy duty payback.  If he’d been a better, more conscientious officer, we wouldn’t have complained, and as a result of those complaints, he wouldn’t have been reassigned to the motor pool.  And once he arrived at the motor pool, if he hadn’t pissed off everybody there -- and most especially, if he hadn’t pissed off the transportation sergeant -- he wouldn’t have gotten stuck with the bill for a missing $88,000 generator.

As amused as we all were by his ultimate fate, it didn’t keep us warm in the middle of that bitter Korean winter.

I guess if anybody benefited from this it was the transportation sergeant who, after framing the universally despised Lt. Poindexter, was off the hook for the missing generator and after that never had to buy a drink for himself at the NCO club.

© Buzz Dixon