April, 1971: The Second Division Moves to Camp Casey
	March 27, 1971: A Saturday Trip Into Seoul
	Return to the Index for 1971

On April Fool's Day, I took some pictures around Howze as I was out for a walk. It was cool but the weather was nice. The very next day, though, it snowed and, it being a Friday, I took my camera to work to record a Korean payday.

April 1: Around Camp Howze

Today, at lunchtime, I took my camera out for a walk around Camp Howze. There are some big changes coming up, and I thought this might be the last time I'd get to capture some pictures of my home as it has been for the last nine months. Some of these views you may have seen before.

This is the Camp Howze Officers' Club- officially known as the Wainwright Officers Open Mess. I am not sure I ever knew who Wainwright was, but the term "open mess" just means that any servicemember of officer rank can stop in and have a meal or utilize these facilities. There are messes that are not open to all officers, but I don't know that I have run across one.

My BOQ is further up the hill behind Wainwright; when I come down to the Finance Office in the morning I walk around the right side of the building and come down the steps you see here. Right now, I am down on one of the small streets that run through the camp, and the Finance Office is a few hundred feet away to my right.

On my little lunchtime walk, I am going to go up to the BOQ for a while.

Camp Howze sits mostly in a small valley, open at one end to the main highway to Seoul. The fenced boundary of the camp runs pretty much in a circle at the crest of the surrounding hills. It comes fairly close to the Officers' Mess, and as I passed the mess on my way further up the hill I snapped the picture at right.

This is one of the Koreans employed by the Second Division to do things that would occupy too much Division manpower, such as performing routine security tasks. The Finance Office has another of these Koreans that drives me or someone else if we have to visit an outlying installation.

These semi-military Koreans are KATUSAs- Korean Augmentation To United States Army. They have their own units and chain of command, but they are detailed to various installations for these kinds of services. A contigent of about a dozen of these KATUSAs provides 24-hour guard around the camp.

The situation here in Korea is a bit odd. It is still, technicall, a war zone, but US Military Command recognizes that the danger of attack is very low. So, except for a couple of outposts right up on the DMZ, US Servicemen don't actually stand guard duty anymore; it is contracted out. Security is not required at all in Seoul itself, although there are the usual checkpoint gates at the entrances to Yongsan- simply to keep them from being overrun by civilians looking for work or to cadge one thing or another. But in the area between the city and the border, we use these Koreans to help out. I believe that the US Government helps defray their cost, but basically it is part of the ROK Army's role in maintaining their own defense. These KATUSAs are ubiquitous- a common fixture- and, as such almost unnoticeable.

I got up to the BOQ to relax for a bit, and took a couple of pictures of the landscape around me. At left is a gate through the security fence towards the back of Camp Howze. If there ever was a door to nowhere, this is it. At one time it must have served a useful function, but now this back door to Camp Howze lies unused and covered with barbed wire.

Below is a picture looking out to the valley to the southeast, and you can see the fertile farmland and the road to Seoul:

To get the picture of the gate above left, I walked a short ways from the BOQ, which is a one-story affair, along the fence to the northwest. Because the Officers's Club is southwest of the BOQ down the hill, I could eventually see the back part of Camp Howze.

I put on my long lens and took the picture at right that shows in the nearground one of the new enlisted barracks, more resembling a college dorm than anything else. This building actually sits below the Officer's Club, and a short distance around to the north. You can see other camp buildings just below the crest of the hill at the back of Camp Howze.

Earlier in this album you can see much more of Camp Howze on the page for the walking tour of the camp that I took shortly after my arrival. You will find this page as one of the pages for 1970.

April 2: At the Finance Office

As happened fairly often during my time here, the weather changed literally overnight. It had been fairly sunny yesterday, and about 60 degrees, but by the time I'd got down to the Finance Office the next day, the temperature had dropped to close to freezing and it had begun to snow slowly and very wetly.

This view looks from the Finance Office back along and up the hill towards the Officers' Club and my BOQ. I believe those are the buildings of G-2 and G-1 in the picture.

This is Mr. "Sammy" Ko, the Korean accountant employed by the Finance office.

Mr. Ko was one of many Koreans hired by the US Army for various positions. Usually, any office that had to deal with Korean civilians hired at least a few to help- as relatively few Koreans spoke English well enough to conduct business. "Sammy" (I don't recall ever learning is actual given name) was almost invaluable to us, insofar as the office did a lot of business direcctly with Korean workers and contractors. Mr. Ko was probably the hardest worker in the office, and on this particular Saturday morning he was at work, helping to pay a Korean payroll. A trusted employee, he knew all the regulations, and if he said something should be done a certain way, by God we did it that way. I never caught him making a mistake, in anybody's favor. I suspect, though, that he was able to do a bit for friends of his because of his position, much like buying a car from your brother-in-law and getting a good deal. And I also think that his job with us enhanced his status in the small town nearby where he lived with his family.

This is one of my cashiers, Stuart MacIntosh, trying to sort out the jumble of Koreans in front of him.

This is my other cashier, Norm Foster, counting some of the Korean Won used to pay the payrolls.

Koreans, it seemed to me, had less regard for privacy than we might. If one person was getting paid at the window, all the other people would crowd around to see the transaction and how much it was for. In the States we might politely queue up at a bank, allowing one customer at a time to transact business in private. Not so here. Sometimes, there were so many people trying to get a look at what was going on that the flimsy interior walls of our quonset hut would actually bend. At times like this, all we could do was try to see the humor in the situation, as Stu was doing when I took his picture.

Even though Korean workers didn't get paid all that much by our standards, it took a big stack of bills to pay them all, since the largest Won note is currently 500 Won, which is somewhere around 350 to the dollar. So you can see that it might take a lot of bills to pay an entire payroll. Sammy would subdivide the master payroll, and organize one group of people at the window at a time. We would count out all the bills and various coins (there was a 1 Won coin that to us was pretty much worthless; I think it was made of tin) for a group so that if we were out of balance (which happened only rarely) the discrepancy would be easier to track down.

We normally always paid in new bills, obtained on our period "money runs" down to the bank in Seoul, and if soldiers wanted to convert some dollars to Won, they got new bills, too. This was because by the time bills circulated for only a short time in the Korean economy, they'd passed through so many hands and been stuffed into so many pockets that they were pretty worn and grubby (not being made out of linen paper as our currency is). It would have been very difficult to count and store.

April 10: More of Camp Howze

Big changes are underway at Camp Howze, but I want to save discussion of them until the next album page. To conclude this page, I want to show you some pictures that I took on Saturday when I'd gone for another walk around the camp to watch some of the activity involved with those changes. I also had work to do at the Finance Office to finish up our part of these changes.

I took this photo over on the other side of the camp. Those are some of the new soldiers that have been arriving here at Camp Howze over the last few weeks as preparations are made for the big changes that I have mentioned. Camp Howze has, up until now, been a support post; there have not been any combat soldiers parked here to speak of.

Because of that, I suppose, the atmosphere around Camp Howze has been, since I got here last June, more relaxed than it is at the other, smaller bases in the area, where actual combat and support troops are garrisoned (and have been since the end of hostilities twenty years ago. I suppose these outlying spots would be susceptible to infiltrators from North Korea, but Camp Howze is far enough south that this is unlikely here.

In any event, the new troops that have been arriving have been coming from some of these outlying areas where military routine is more in evidence. That's why I took this picture; I can't recall the last time I saw any number of troops marching in formation aroud Camp Howze, save for ceremonial occasions. They happen to be going by the G-3 office (Operations), and the center Camp Howze is just ahead of them. The big green building is the theater.

The new units that have been arriving have brought with them tanks and other equipment, which were again something we didn't see much of here at Camp Howze. These vehicles are parked in a new area that has been cleared down by the front gate.

In front of Camp Howze, here are some Korean houses and other buildings and a small creek that served alternately as an irrigation ditch and sewer.

This is typical countryside, with every available square inch given over to agriculture, at this time of year the paddies contained the stubble of the last crop.

This picture was taken late in the afternoon, a few hundred feet from the gated entrance to Camp Howze.

Well, so much for Camp Howze the way it has been, and my routines, the way they have been, for the last nine months. Let's talk about the significant changes that are happening, and what they will mean for me and my friends.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	April, 1971: The Second Division Moves to Camp Casey
	March 27, 1971: A Saturday Trip Into Seoul
	Return to the Index for 1971