Land of Call Signs

I've been thinking of our time in Korea since last Sunday Storytime. Here's one that you haven't read yet, even if you did get my letters from Seoul.


18 June 2005


We’ve been married for 6 years now and I was thinking the other day about what I like most about doing the military thing. I’m pretty sure it’s the language of it. The military has one of its own, full of acronyms and shortened, unexpected names for things.

On Bryan’s ships, for instance, officers had to get qualified for different positions or duty stations and part of the process was sitting for an oral board with the senior officers. The custom is to bring an edible gift that will be eaten by the board as the examination proceeds. The gift is called, “Smack.” As in, “I have to bring some smack in for the board tomorrow.” Why do they call it “smack”? Because you’re kissing up.

When we have two of something that we only need one of, we call the second one a “battle spare.” When someone gets stuck talking to the motor mouth in the room and absorbs all the excessive chatter while the rest of us are freed up to enjoy the party, the guy who is stuck is called “canon fodder.”

It’s all so clever. I just love it.

And of course, there are the call signs. Pilots all have one because they need one. And they don’t get to choose them, either, so they are never cool like “Maverick” or “Ice Man.” Those are names that a twenty-two year old would pick for himself, not the name the guys you fly with want to use when talking to you at 30 thousand feet. No, real call signs finely blend an apt description with a fair amount of insensitivity.

One of our unaccompanied friends here is Charles, call sign “Hawk” because he’s bald, black and cut out of granite, much like the guy on Spencer for Hire.

One guy here is called “Panda” because he’s as overweight as the Air Force allows and pandas are the one creature on Earth that would rather eat than mate. (To this, Panda himself explains, “But I’ve got 3 kids, so don’t think it’s accurate.“)

Brad, a redhead on our cul-de-sac, is call signed “Archie.” Neil earned himself the call sign “Rude Boy” because of some bad gas he once passed in a two-man cockpit.

A pilot’s call sign travels with him, even when he’s not on a flying tour. I generally use an officer’s real name because using their special language feels too contrived, like a goody-two-shoes girl deciding to cuss. But sometimes a call sign suits a guy so well, I cannot resist it.

For instance, I started out calling one of our unaccompanied friends, “Todd,” as in “Todd Flesh,” but then I got to know him. He is big, out-going, blunt, and lovably crass. So I call him “Meat,” just as everyone else does. After all, this is the guy who declared at our dinner table that he and his wife had four children, but no more because he was “a fixed animal.”

Meat is an Airforce pilot, but this tour, he’s out of the cockpit and planning in Bryan’s office. He does two things almost every weekend: the first is hanging out with Lt. Col. Kim, who, after the Americans stopped going to the soju weekly parties, seized upon Meat as the fun-loving guy who couldn’t be a sucker for his wife like the other Americans. Kim routinely shows up at Meat’s place every Saturday morning to take him out on the town--hiking up mountains, trolling through the fish mart, hanging out at the major league ballpark to cheer on the Seoul All-Stars. Meat complains about this because Kim calls him “Fleshie” and because the camaraderie has made Kim feel so comfortable that he’ll show up drunk at Meat’s house at odd hours and crash somewhere inside, once even in Meat’s own bed.

When Meat is not with Kim, he is shopping. I’ve never known a man to shop as much as Meat does. His favorite excursion is taking the bus down to Ossan, the Air Force base about an hour and a half South of here if there’s no traffic. Most people on Post go down now and then, as the shopping is cheaper there, especially the tailoring of new uniforms. We knew we wanted to get there at least once, so one Saturday, Bryan and I packed up Gemma and drove down with Meat as our guide.

The highway down, like all the roads we’ve driven here, was in terrific shape. Not too much traffic, either. The landmark for our exit is the YKK factory. “They made your zipper, Amy,” Meat said.

I was un-nerved.

“Seriously. Look at your zipper.” I scooched down in the back seat, pulled my shirt up, my waist band down. Sonofagun. YKK.

“That’s a good trick for a party,” he said. “Bet anyone there that you know the letters on their zipper--it’s gonna be YKK. You show me 3 pairs of pants and I’ll bet you my left nut that at least one pair has a YKK zipper.”

“That’s pretty confident,” I said.

“Damn right I’m confident. I hear it’s something like 65% of zippers in the western hemisphere are YKK.”

“But you only bet on 33% odds.”

He shrugged. “It’s my left nut we’re talking about.”

So go ahead, people. Right now. Check your zippers. How about that, huh?

[UPDATE: In the comments section, people have begun checking in on their zippers. I put up a new poll so we can streamline this baby. Tell what's on your zipper!]


Our first stop on Base was their PX. It was at least 3 times bigger than ours and I was gushing with envy. It is one thing to be on Yongsan, thinking of everything that is back in the States that I cannot enjoy right now. It is another to see what the military families here get to enjoy. Their housing looked a lot better than hours. Their playgrounds were new. Sheesh. Air Force. Among the branches, there are rivalries and on-going jokes. What we say about the Air Force is that they build their houses and golf courses first, and then ask Congress for more money to build the airstrips. We ate lunch at Checkers, a restaurant the likes of which we don’t have either.

Then we left the Base to shop and I retracted every last drop of envy. There was basically just one street, several blocks long, with a few side streets connecting, all packed full of the stores Americans would want to shop at. Purse shops. Tailors. Trophy stores that custom make coins. It was just like our Itaewon district, only smaller and with no trace of the Russians. And aside from Itaewon, what was here? Nothing. No subway system sprawling throughout a cosmopolitan metropolis. Just a zipper factory a couple miles up the road.

Meat brought us to his favorite shop where they did a duo business of selling luggage and embroidering luggage tags. “I’ve gotten just about everyone at home some of these tags. They keep placing their orders like I’m the QVC or something.” He said this over his shoulder as he opened the door and stepped in.

All the girls behind the counter looked over and shouted, “Meatie!” at him and giggled.

“Hey ladies,” he said with a big grin. “These are my friends, Bryan and Amy and the baby. What’s the baby’s name again?”

We smiled, said “Anyang” and waited for the ensuing chorus of “She so cyuute!” No chorus. They hardly even noticed us. All eyes were on Meat. He is tall, broad shouldered, blonde, blue-eyed. Everything the typical Korean man is not.

Meat came along side me and said out the side of his mouth, “I want you to know I always wear my ring when I come down here.” Then he ordered more luggage tags. I ordered two for myself, and chose a Snoopy Fly Ace to go on it. Ordered a pink one for Gemma with a Hello Kitty. Bryan picked a boring Navy Blue one with an oak leaf, his rank.

They’d be done in an hour. Before we left, Meat and I took a look at full-sized roller bags, both intending to buy one. My approach to this kind of shopping is to pick out what I want, ask for a price, pose a counter-offer and gauge from the vendor’s reaction whether bargaining was welcome. I didn’t get a chance to pursue my approach because we figured that buying two together would get a better price and Meat told me he’d handle the negotiations.

Meat’s approach was to say, first, “These got YKK zippers? Because if it ain’t YKK, we’re out of here.”

The lady giggled and whined, kitty like, “I don’t know. . .”

“Got to be YKK! Got to stick with the home team, right?” He smiled at her and didn’t bother checking the zipper.

Meat followed his wind-up with, “Tell you what: If you can climb into this suitcase, and let me zip you up, I’ll buy it.”

She blushed and laughed and shook her head and said, “No, no!”

“Come on, come on. I bet you’d fit. Look how small you are.” He turned to me and said, “Look how small she is!” She kept laughing.

We left with a price quote that sounded standard to me, with no discount if we both bought one. Maybe the lady was just starting out hard with the intention of coming down once we came back to buy them.

We poked around the district for an hour. Ran into a guy the work with, Tom Timmerman, call sign “T2.” So I guess not all call signs are insensitive.

We returned to the luggage shop, the name of which I don’t know because we Americans don’t use the names of shops in this kind of district. We have, well, call signs for them. Like, “That luggage shop in Ossan, the second one on the right, across from the MacDonald’s,” or, “The purse guy in Itaewon who’s down the block from the money exchange before you hit the light at that antique place.” It occurs to me that being in a foreign country causes you to give nearly everything your own call sign. It’s either that or learn the language.

Meat and I picked out the bags we were interested in. The lady wouldn’t come down in price. But the price was the same out in the district. $35 for a full-sized roller bag was a better buy than I’d get in the States. Plus, I really did need a piece of luggage to get back there in the first place.

We bought them and paid for our tags. Mine said, “Ponce.”

“Not ‘Babyduck’?” Bryan asked, as we strolled out, rolling our bags behind us.

“Only you call me ’Babyduck.’” I said.

Meat’s tags said, “Meat.”

“Not ‘Meatie’?” I asked.

He grinned. Then he shrugged and said, “You get a better price if you flirt with them a little.”

“We paid full price!” I said.

He blushed. “Yeah. Might as well call me ‘Sucker.’”