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.