Discipline: Army

Squad 7 had about 30 men.
But something felt off right away.
I’d always pictured the army as guys with sun-bronzed skin radiating raw energy, but when I walked into the barracks, there was no formal check-in, nothing — everyone was just asleep.
Someone told me to take a bunk and sleep too, so I lay down in a daze, but I couldn’t.
Around 8pm, another dozen or so guys walked in fully armed and geared up, quietly took their gear off, and went straight to sleep.
What on earth was going on here.
Around 1am, the lights in the barracks came on and I saw everyone’s faces for the first time — all pale.
That’s when it clicked: this was a sentry unit.
No roll call, no exercise, no training — just eat, go out on guard duty around the clock regardless of day or night, come back, eat, sleep.
The only time everyone was actually awake at once was maybe 3 to 6pm.
At 6, the night-shift guys would eat and head out; when they came back around 2am, the morning-shift guys would take over.
That was the whole rhythm.

Anyway — each time I went out, I’d spend eight or nine hours in a tiny bunker overnight, killing time with a boring senior soldier while listening to the waves and staring at a pitch-black sea.
Over three or four months, I went on exactly one run and played soccer exactly once.

I didn’t really mind any of it — I tried to do everything well, and I did.
I never got called any of the usual army curse words, never got a punch thrown at me, not even a slap.
The perfect soldier.
The soldier nobody could pick on.
The soldier who just handled things on his own.
But that very perfection became a cage I locked myself in, and I started coming apart inside it, slowly.
A compulsion started closing in on me — you have to do well, you can’t make a mistake, you can’t disappoint anyone — and being stuck in a space where, after telling myself
“good job today,”
there was nothing I could actually give myself as a reward, started driving me out of my mind.

No matter how hard the work was, no matter how badly I got treated, I could put up with any of it — as long as I had the power to walk away whenever I wanted.
But the army, as an institution, allowed for no such thing, and there wasn’t even the smallest crack left in my mind, no room left to breathe.
Living as an isolated platoon, cut off from the larger unit, didn’t help either.
There was a private first class who worked as the cook — a sergeant beat him with a shovel so badly the right side of his face was nearly caved in, and the platoon leader and assistant platoon leader both just kept quiet about it.
If something like that got reported, it would hurt their own promotions — that must have been it, because otherwise they’d have gotten him to a hospital.

On top of everything, my girlfriend had stopped writing to me.
Then one night, as the weather was turning warm, I broke.
I clawed at my own face with a razor blade and slammed my forehead into the wall as hard as I could.
Why did I do it — was I trying to die?
I don’t think so.
If I’d wanted to die, I would have cut deeper and hit the wall harder.
I didn’t want to die.
What was it, then — some kind of protest, in my own way, I suppose: send me somewhere else, send me home.
Not that it was ever going to work.
Either way, the assistant platoon leader hauled me onto his back and carried me to company headquarters.
The company commander looked at me, and — I have no idea what he was actually thinking — but from his face it was something like: this idiot went and did something, what the hell happened, Amuro, you okay?
Damn it, there goes my promotion.
I can’t really know what was going on in his head, but he laid me down on a bed and stepped outside to make phone call after phone call.
Even with everything going on, somehow I needed to pee.
Well, I needed to pee, what could I do about it — getting up and walking to the bathroom in that moment felt absurd, so I just wet myself where I lay.
The company commander came back in.
You little shit — if someone ends up like this, you send them to a hospital first, and instead he was trying to cover it up and manage it quietly.
Either way, he started hitting me — I think I took something like 40 or 50 slaps across the face.
And the next day, they put me in the psychiatric ward at the Gangneung Armed Forces Hospital.

The psychiatric ward is a sad and funny place, all at once.
Real drama unfolds there — no sitcom I’ve ever seen compares, and no thriller either.
I spent two months there, and eventually came home due to
“unstable brain waves.”

On October 23rd, 1998, I headed for Nonsan.
What’s in Nonsan, you ask?
Boot camp.
The first night was kind of strange — lying there on the floor, I remember thinking, what is this exactly?
Is this the army?
Is this camping?
Some kind of school retreat?
I lay there wide-eyed, turning it over in my head, when — bugle call, that classic wake-up melody — I snapped awake.
Whoa, make your bed and fall in within five minutes, and suddenly I’m running laps around the field.
Blink, and two weeks had passed, and I’m firing an M16.
Blink again, and I’m on a 40km march in full combat gear.

Boot camp was a no-smoking zone, and by around day 10 the withdrawal symptoms were hitting me hard.
One day, while we were moving somewhere, I spotted a long cigarette butt on the ground and snatched it up fast.
Feeling around in my pocket, I could tell — just filter and paper, the tobacco inside was empty.
Like someone had pinched the cigarette out with their fingers, except instead of the whole middle section coming out, only the burning tip and the loose tobacco had gone with it, leaving the paper tube intact.
That’s what I’d picked up.
From that day on, my hobby was collecting butts.
About one a day, and once I had a dozen or so, I’d go to the bathroom and start reassembling them — pulling the tobacco out of each butt and packing it into one long empty tube, carefully, so the paper wouldn’t tear.
Eventually I had one complete cigarette in my hand, plus two co-conspirators, who’d earned their spot in this project by virtue of owning a lighter.
The three of us took our long, glorious drags to savor the moment — and hacked and coughed, because there was no taste at all.
Just the flavor of smoking a dead leaf.
I mean, come on, how anticlimactic can you get.
I only learned chemistry from a textbook, so sure, fine — but somebody should have mentioned in chemistry class that tobacco exposed to open air that long stops being tobacco.

Then one day, on our way to a religious service, I saw one of the drill instructors flick his cigarette and toss it on the road — and this one felt different.
This guy’s an amateur.
The still-lit butt tumbled through the air in slow motion and hit the bathroom wall before dropping to the ground.
I looked around, and there was a buddy of mine, and we locked eyes with the exact same glimmer — no plan, no words exchanged, we just naturally peeled off from formation, grabbed the butt, took one long drag each, and slipped back into formation without anyone noticing.
This time, I didn’t breathe out right away.
I held the smoke, pulled it as deep into my lungs as I could on the inhale, then held my breath again.
Almost nothing came back out on the exhale.
Even every single cell in my lungs seemed to be rooting for me — and it wasn’t just in my head.
I could feel the whole process: absorbed in the lungs, dissolved into the blood, pumped back out through the heart to the whole body, delivered through the capillaries all the way to my fingertips.
I’ve quit and started again more times than I can count since then, but nothing has ever hit as hard as that one did.

A few days before boot camp graduation, they gathered everyone to pick out soldiers with special skills.
When they called for bass players, I shot my hand up and ripped through Rancid’s
“Maxwell Murder.”
A few days later, half-nervous, half-excited, I went to where they were announcing the assignments.
Da-da-da-dum~ Trainee number 176!
Drumroll….
Mortar squad!
Well, damn.
A punk band in the military — of course they had no spot for me.
My mistake for getting my hopes up in the first place.
And so for another four weeks, I hauled a 17kg mortar base plate on my back across one hill after another, digging holes, and then digging some more.

I boarded a train at Nonsan Station — the day I’d be heading to my actual unit.
I had no idea where I was going.
The train stopped here and there, people getting off along the way, and by the time I noticed, it was night.
A familiar skyline came into view.
Seoul.
Could it be — the 17th Division — nicknamed the
“Tang Dynasty unit,”
army slang for an outfit with basically no discipline?
The Capital Defense Command?
Paju?
My head was full of every hopeful scenario imaginable when we got off at Cheongnyangni.
At that point I was still convinced it’d be the Capital Defense Command, or Uijeongbu at worst — but they fed us some strange boxed lunch and put us right back on a train.
The train stopped in Wonju.
We spent three days at some unit there, then got loaded onto a bus, crossing mountains and rivers, stopping here and there to let people off, until it was just me and one other guy who looked kind of dazed.
We spent one more night at yet another unit, and left early the next morning.
The bus wound its way over a few hills, and after the last, biggest ridge, the East Sea suddenly opened up in front of us, sunlight pouring down over the water.
Whoa — is this it?
Is this really it?
The unit sat on a high bluff at the edge of Yeongjin Harbor — Yeongdeok and Jumunjin up the coast, Sacheon below, and Gangneung visible way off in the distance.
I loved the sea — in fact, just a month or two earlier I’d taken a bus alone at dawn to that same stretch of coast near Sacheon.
But the next day, my platoon got assigned, and I ended up in the place everyone called
“7”
— and the moment I saw my seniors there, I knew something was wrong.

I couldn’t smell from the day I was born.
I just grew up thinking that was normal — it never really bothered me.
If something gets taken away from you, sure, that’s sad and unfair, but if you never had it to begin with, you don’t even know what you’re missing, so you just live with it.
Especially when it’s not like I was missing arms or legs, or couldn’t see — it was just smell.
Still, my parents took me to the hospital from early on, hoping the sensor might somehow recover, or that clearing out the sinusitis might open the passage and let me start smelling things.
From their side, it must have been heartbreaking.
When I was around 12, the hospital said: let’s do the surgery when you turn 19.
Do it too young, they said, and the bone could deform — better to wait until you’re fully grown.

I turned 19.
I’m sitting in a hospital room talking with the doctor.
Since you’re young, he says, let’s skip general anesthesia and just do local — you can tough it out.
How bad could the pain really be, he says, it’s only about 20 minutes.
Fine, I say.
Surgery day.
I walk into the operating room wide awake.
Doctor 1, Doctor 2, Nurse 1, Nurse 2, Nurse 3.
Doctor 1 comes over with a syringe and injects anesthetic somewhere inside my mouth and nose, and then all these instruments come into view — who wouldn’t be scared?
But I’m Amuro.
Nineteen years old, in my prime, Amuro.
When the first instrument goes into my nose and gently touches somewhere on the inner wall, I think: oh, so this is what it feels like, not so bad.
That confidence doesn’t last 30 seconds.
The scraping, the cutting — it stops being just sound and starts coming through as sensation.
Wait, is this thing even numb?
The feeling is that vivid, and the pain is beyond words.
Somewhere deep in my pride, me and my nervous system’s survival instinct start fighting it out for real.
Tell them to stop?
Are you insane?
You’re a man.
The surgery drags on for about two hours, and all I can think about is slitting Doctor 2’s throat.
Everything I’d heard in the pre-op briefing is now vivid enough that even I — not just the doctor — can follow along in real time.
There’s a vertical partition inside the nasal cavity of the skull, and mine had been bent out of shape from years of trapped pus; the plan was to drain the pus, cut into the partition and the muscle beside it, stitch it back up, and let the muscle contract as it healed to pull the partition straight again.
And yeah — I can tell exactly what’s happening.
Now they’re cutting the partition.
Now Doctor 2 slips and cuts into the wrong muscle next to it.
You bastard….
You bastard…
You bastard…
All I can do is clench my fists and repeat that, over and over.

I stayed in the hospital for five days after the surgery, and when I came back ten days later,
“you bastard”
slipped out of me again.
The doctor asks: so, can you smell now?
Yes?
No.

Life is funny like that — around the time I was supposed to head off to the military, I heard that if you couldn’t smell, you might not have to go.
But no hospital could actually prove that you couldn’t smell.
It was a loophole in an unreliable system that depended entirely on your own say-so.
Made sense, in a way — if every man in Korea could just say
“I can’t smell,”
nobody would ever have to serve.
Can’t smell, don’t have to go — but there’s no one who can prove it.
The end!

When I turned 21, there was a general hospital called Samsung Medical Center, founded by Samsung, and one of the ENT department heads there had earned his doctorate — and become quite famous — for developing an objective way to prove someone couldn’t smell.
The day I went in for my appointment, they had this whole elaborate setup ready for me.
For four hours I tasted sample after sample — salty water, slightly less salty, even less salty, sweet water, slightly less sweet, even less sweet — thousands of little cups, checking boxes on a sheet after each one.
The doctor said he’d invented the pattern himself, and that after tens of thousands of trials he’d statistically mapped out the typical response patterns of normal people, liars, and people who genuinely couldn’t smell — it couldn’t be fooled, he said.
And so, on January 7th, 1998, I was officially certified as a person who couldn’t smell — and officially exempt from the military.
My life plan was quietly rewriting itself into: a guy who doesn’t have to serve.

Then in 1997, presidential candidate Lee Hoi-chang’s son got caught up in a draft-dodging scandal that blew up into a huge national issue, and starting January 1st, 1998, the military service law was revised — anyone who could function normally in daily life would now be drafted, smell or no smell.
My draft notice arrived at the house.
My appeal was denied.