Look at the zipper on your pants - right now. I’ll bet you 5 dollars right here that is has the letters YKK on it. Right there on the little zipper handle.

I always used to wonder what the hell that meant. Then, one day while I was stationed in South Korea, I was riding the public transit bus from Osan to Suwon on my day off when I looked out the window and saw an ordinary looking factory with its name on a sign outside of it. The giant letters spelled out YKK. It was the zipper factory.

I saw many revealing sights like that during my time in South Korea. Most US troops stationed there want nothing more than their Budweiser and their Burger King and the military makes sure it provides that as a small reminder of the comforts of home. The larger Army posts all have a Burger King on them but most of the posts are pretty small; the one where I was had a tiny PX where you couldn’t find a pair of underwear but there was plenty of Budweiser, Coors Light, and Jack Daniels for cheap. It was rationed - you weren’t allowed to buy more than 1 bottle of hard liquor per week and more than 1 case of beer per day. That’s right: 1 case per soldier per day.

I never used up the full extent of my rations but there were plenty of times when I bought a bottle for a buddy who wanted liquor but had already used up his allotment for the week. Of course he could have just walked off the post at the end of the day (if we weren’t in the field) and bought some Jack Daniels or some Soju off the Koreans but most of them were more comfortable staying in familiar surroundings.

There were a few of us who liked to go exploring. The first words I learned were beer, where is the bathroom, and can I bum a cigarette - it was all I needed and I never got much further with the language. We’d go into theaters where they showed American movies with Korean subtitles and the concession stand sold dried squid along with the popcorn. We’d go into restaurants and order food by pointing at things on the menu that cost what we wanted to pay and waiting to see what arrived.

You weren’t supposed to wear your uniform when you went out there or to tell people that you were US troops. So at first when we’d wind up drinking with a party of Koreans, we’d tell them that we taught english. Eventually we got tired of the idiotic charade (we weren’t fooling anyone) and just told them the truth. If we got drunk enough, we’d exaggerate: a couple of times I told them we were special forces and started putting out cigarettes on the back of my hand to further emphasize my point. I was drunk and it didn’t really hurt that much. I’m not sure if they were impressed or just thought I was a moron.

I came to love the food, culture, people, and art of South Korea. And there’s a lot of great contemporary art coming out of there these days. Below is a link to a little 5-minute word movie. Be warned: there’s some coarse language used. It’s all about two-fisting beer and bourbon and driving all night and pissing on the sidewalk and Elvis. It’s the kind of thing that Jack Kerouac would be doing if he was alive today. But don’t watch it right now. Wait till it’s late at night. Go into your kitchen and chug a beer real fast. Then come back to your computer, turn the volume all the way up, and click.