Sleeping Bags Who remembers those mountain bags? After the first winter in them you knew why they gave us two and that wasn't enough. The second winter with the down sleeping bags and parka coats and hats and snow pack boots made life a lot more comfortable.

Chow in Korea They must have had a ton of Spam, Dinty Moore's beef stew or corned beef hash to get rid of in the fifties because that's all we seemed to get. Pancakes, oh, did they taste good! They were only a mixture of flour, powdered eggs and powered milk. Some times you got the mixture right not always. The bacon in a can fried up good. That's where you got the grease to cook the pancakes. Walter Malloy still talks about those pancakes. The Cook brothers are still remembered for their varied menu of scrambled egg, pancakes, spam, or the many tastes of Dinty Moore's corned beef hash or beef stew. You can still find Dinty's products on the supermarket shelves. I may break down and buy some before I die just to see if my memory is still good. The cardboard containers that the seven man, seven days rations came in were excellent insulators to sleep on. In defense of the cooks they didn't have a whole lot to work with.

Lesson in Driving When the force of gravity is greater than the static force of friction between two surfaces the moveable object will move. If you are driving a truck uphill your forward velocity will diminish slowly until you come to a standstill. At this point, you will start to slide backwards. Slowly, at first, but your speed will increase in the wrong direction no matter what you do. The roads as constructed by the Koreans were designed for vehicles other than trucks with rubber tires. They had dog legs and switchbacks to get a vehicle from one side of the mountain to the other. We had massive dozers that could cut and fill to eliminate those dog legs and cut backs to straighten out those twists and turns. The driver being young but basically a good driver did everything to avoid the end of this story. As he started up the ice covered hill he noticed that his forward velocity was decreasing no matter what he did. He quickly down shifted and transferred to four wheel drive and still continued to lose forward velocity. When the truck finally came to a stop he tried his brakes. At this point, the truck started going down hill backwards. Thank goodness for an embankment that the rear of the vehicle slammed into just before the fill area started. I suppose every story has a moral. This one is "Never drive up an ice covered hill that is Sun-lit in early afternoon with a lightly loaded truck!"