Tony Marchant's life 

August 10, 2005

Today we had a Change of Command for our Unit Commander. Yeah I know, nothing exciting about that. I was next to CPL Choi in formation. We must have stood there for 2 hours without being able to move. It really is a stupid old formality that noone wants to do, but because the Army never changes we still have them. All the soldiers have to stand at attention for hours while the commanders talk about how much they appreciate us coming to thier ceremony, knowing full-well that we had no choice, and if it was up to us, nobody would even attend their ceremony.


But we made the most of it. During a little break time we goofed around. Here is Choi chocking Nam one of the other Katusa's.


And here is Choi again, acting like a dork for the camera. Nice beret Choi! Oje thing about Choi is that he is addicted to video games. I have never seen anyone play more video games than this guy. He's real good at them, but he should be for as much as he plays.


This was during the ceremony. They didn't need me to stand in the formation for the ceremony after all (afte3r I had been standing there for 2 hours already). I just hng out in the stands and waited for it to end. Yeehaw!

Speaking of being addicted to video games, CPL Choi has nothing compared to this guy. I read an article in yahoo today about a guy in South Korea who died from a heart attack from playing video games for 50 hours straight. Now that's dedication! Here's the article:

SEOUL (Reuters) - A South Korean man who played computer games for 50 hours almost non-stop died of heart failure minutes after finishing his mammoth session in an Internet cafe, authorities said Tuesday.

The 28-year-old man, identified only by his family name Lee, had been playing on-line battle simulation games at the cybercafe in the southeastern city of Taegu, police said.

Lee had planted himself in front of a computer monitor to play on-line games on Aug. 3. He only left the spot over the next three days to go to the toilet and take brief naps on a makeshift bed, they said.

"We presume the cause of death was heart failure stemming from exhaustion," a Taegu provincial police official said by telephone.

Lee had recently quit his job to spend more time playing games, the daily JoongAng Ilbo reported after interviewing former work colleagues and staff at the Internet cafe.

After he failed to return home, Lee's mother asked his former colleagues to find him. When they reached the cafe, Lee said he would finish the game and then go home, the paper reported.

He died a few minutes later, it said.

South Korea, one of the most wired countries in the world, has a large and highly developed game industry.

August 8, 2005

Well, today turned out to be a very interesting day. The Chaplain, Jung, and I drove down to K-16 and caught a plane to Daegu. The Chaplain wanted to see some soldiers down there and asked us if we wanted to come. I had never been that far South, so I said sure. We gotg to fly in the General's plane, which was an 8 person propeller plane. It had nice seats that went all the way back. I took full advantage of it and went to sleep.


Chaplain Horovitz on the plane heading to Daegu.


Jung with his usual "peace sign" pose for the camera.


And there is me.


The pilots were very nice and we made it alive which was the best part.


We took a little tour of one of the chapels while we were at Camp Walker, then we went to lunch in Camp Henry with the Chaplain Assistant Sergeant Major. He bought us lunch and we told stories the whole time.


One of the windows at the Chapel. After leaving, we hung out at the SGM's office and played cards with him, while we waited for CH Horovitz to get back. I was getting really sleepy sitting on the couch and I had brought my laptopwith me, so I pulled it out and was watching another episode of LOST, when the SGM walked by and asked "what Field Manual are you looking at?" in a joking voice. I just looked at him and said "Survival Sergeant Major" and went back to watching my show. He said that was a good answer.


Well onj the way back we ran into some problems. First the weather got real bad so we had to land at Camp Humphries which is about 2 hours from where we needed to go. The when there was a little break in the weather, we got back on the plane to take off and the engine wouldn't start. We tried it again and it started to smoke. Now we were stranded with no way of getting back to the base. There was a guy who was nice enough to give us a ride to the bus station, but we ran into another problem there. The last bus had left an hour ago. We just happened to see the guy who gave us a ride when we were walking through the entrance of the PX and asked him to give us a lift to the subway station.

Getting a lift from a pilot to the subway station.

We managed to finally get to the subway when we ran into another problem, The Chaplain didn't have enough money on his card to take the subway and we didn't have any won on us. We ran our card through and he walked thorugh the gate.

Once we got on the subway and were heading for home, I learned a valuable lesson. Never wear an Army uniform on the Subway. Everyone knew we were soldiers and one guy got really mad at us. He started to yell at me and CH Horovitz to shut up in English. Jung said he was drunk, and managed to calm the guy down. I thought we were going to get in a fight and go to jail for sure. I don't know what Jung said to that guy, but he calmed down and said he was sorry even, CH Horovitz gave him a few cookies even.


CH Horovitz on nthe train before we almost got into an argument with the drunk guy.

Well CH Horovitz got off the train before us and we forgot that he didn't have enough money, but by the time we realized it, the trainwas already leaving. I don't know how he got home last night. Maybe he gave the security guy a cookie. Haha. We didn't get home until 10:30 last night.

August 6, 2005

Today I went with Kim to Electronics Market to buy parts to build my first computer. I have never built a computer before, but I didn't think it could be too hard, so I decided to build my own and save myself about $2000. I have been marking every day that I am here on a calendar that I bought while I was in the states. That is a picture of it above.


We went to a computer shop at E. Market and I saw this monitor at the store we went to. It might look like a regular monitor to some of you, but if you look hard enough you can see that this guy is using a cardboard box to hold him monitor screen in. Instead of spending $5 for a box to install it in, he decided to go the ghetto route and build his own. Pretty creative guy!


Here is my baby almost completed. I installed a 3.2 GHz SATA motherboard, Pentium D processor, 1 GB RAM, 250 GB SATA hard drive, 16X DVD RW drive, wireless LAN Card, and a TV card. I als got a 1.3 Megapixel camera and a wireless keyboard and mouse for it. This baby is sooo fast. Of course in 2 months it will be obsolete and they'll have 8.2 MHz speed, but for right now, this is the fastest you can find.


And here she is all finished. I love the box that I found for it. It's pretty cool and hides all of the USB ports and drives.


This is another pic of it with the doors open, so that you can see where it's all hidden.


And this is what time I finished making the damn thing. I started at 8 AM shopping for the parts, so in total it took me 14 hours. I wasted an entire Saturday on this thing. It was well worth it though. Sherry really needed a new computer. The old one at home just isn;t good for anything except browsing the internet now.


I found this article in a magazine today. I copied it and saved it for my memory box. It's about the Seoul International Marathon that they had back in March. Inside of it was an article and the author interviewed me about it.


Here is a closer picture of the interview, I highlighted the part where I am speaking in yellow for you. I thought it was pretty cool.

August 5, 2005

Well my Runner's World magazine finally arrived in the mail today. It got here a month late, because the new issue is on the magazine rack at the store already. Geez. I was just happy to finally get it. I've been going to my mailbox every day for the past month hoping that it would be there.

This is my chia pet guy that i got for a $Buck at a store a few weeks ago. The guy needs to shake his back though because it's really hairy. Poor guy.

My new favorite show. I finished watching Desperate housewives and have started watching Lost now. I'm on episode 12 right now. It's starting to get good. A lot of koreans have seen teh show too because there are 2 Koreans on the show and the woman who is on it is a very famous actress here in Korea. They think she's a famous American actress now too.

I decided to make a little memories chest for myself. I started putting all dorts of things that I have collected from Korea and put them in this box to remember them when I leave here.I found the box in my office. It used to have cards of all the soldiers that the chaplain counseled in it, but they were all from the early 1990's, so I threw them away and kept the box.

My XBox collection is starting to get pretty big now. I would have more games than these even, but I've given quite a few of them away. There is a place where I can buy them for $5 each right now. I don't know what I'll do with all of them when the new Xbox comes out later this year. I'm sure I can find someone on Ebay who will buy it. Haha.

August 3, 2005

It's getting a lot closer to leaving Korea now. Only 41 days to go before I head to Osan and catch my flight out of here.

I had something cool happen to me today. I called the radio station to request a song today, which has become sort of a daily routine now. Everyone always sees me and tells me they heard my song being played on the radio that day. Well today, I got to actually hear myself on the radio. The lady wanted to know why I didn't request something like Metallica today, since my request was a pretty mellow song, and I told her it was because I had requested Metallica yesterday. It was pretty cool to hear my own voice on the radio.


Jung and I drove the chaplain to see a soldier near the MP station today after lunch. While we waited for him we saw this dog walking around the office. It's sort of their mascot. The guy kept trying to eat the stick off of my sucker.


Here is Jung with the dog. After visiting that soldier we had to go visit one more at the hospital. We waited so long there for teh Chaplain that we boith went to sleep in the vehicle waiting for him. He was in there for 2 hours.


This is Kim, Fornillos, and Jung. We went out to Kahunaville for dinner tonight because it was the last night that we could eat there before Fornillos headed off to PLDC.


We saw these huge balls on the sidewalk on our way there. They were made out of metal. Kind of interesting I thought.


Iside Kahunaville I spotted these rather interesting lamps. If you can't see it very well, the on/off switch is located on thier "private" areas (which aren't so private).


And here I am looking over the menu for something to eat. Jung and Kim kept asking me to take a picture of our waitress because they thought she looked hot. Then one of the waitresses slipped an fell on her ass in front of us and broke a glass that she was carrying. The food was good though. I ate some shrimp pasta and had ice cream for desert. I'll be eating the leftovers for dinner tomorrow night.

I ran 5.5 miles this morning before work. They called off the exersize while I was at the gym, so I had to hurry and change to get to work. I'm trying to get at least 40 miles this week. I ran another 5 miles after I got back from the restaurant too. So that was almost 11 miles today. So far as of tonght I have 25.5 miles and 4 more days to get the other 15. I think I'll make it. I'm staying up pretty late tonight though, so I may be too tired to get a lot of miles tomorrow. Saturday is also going to be a very bust day for me. Hopefully I can make it. I'll let you know how it goes.

July 31, 2005

Kim came over today and he saw my medal that I won for participating in the Army 10-Miler. So he put it on and pinned on my race number and took this picture of himself to look like he just ran the race. You're such a dork Kim. Magila?


Today we had a Sunday service out at Tango site. We brought along Chaplain Condry to give a Christian service. There aren't many places to hold a service there, but we managed to find some room inside of the dining facility which wasn't being used. Sometimes you just have to make due with what you have.


For instance we didn't have an alter, so we made our own. This tray holds the bowls in the dining facility, but we used it to make a makeshift alter. Notice the bowls used to raise the cross behind the bible. It's sort of our ghetto chapel set-up! Haha


This is a photo of everybody who attended the bible study. We managed to gather as many people as we could. A lot couldn;t make it because of shift changes and because we were still doing an exersize a lot of folks couldn't leave their work place to attend.

June 30, 2005

RACE DAY


I had to wake up at 3:30 this morning. The 8th Army 10-Miler was today. The race started at 7:15, but we had a 2 hour bus ride to get there. I met up with SSG Adams and she gave me a ride to the gym where the bus was picking everyone up.


It was still dark outside when we left at 5 A.M. to head to Camp Casey.


We got to Camp Casey around 6:30. Once we got there I went with Jennifer to get my race number adn stretch before the race. There were 5 of us running from our BN in the race. This race was the qualifyer for the Army 10-miler in Washington D.C. so there were a lot of the really fast runners turning out for this race today. All together there were over 200 people who showed up at 7 AM to run. The top 6 men and women were going to receive a trophy and a free flight to the U.S. to participate in the race.

The race was OK. I was really tired about half way through. I didn't get much sleep the night before, and I started to get some stomach cramps as I was running. They went away after a while, but they kept coming back. I got a decent time though. I came in at 1:24:15, a respectable time for myself. The fastest running came in at 53 minutes, which is less that 6 minutes per mile. That is hauling ass!!!


Here's Jennifer posing with her medal that she got for running the race. They gave us a T-shirt too. She didn't do too bad. She came in 6 minutes after I did. Her time was 18 minutes faster than she ran the race last year.


And here I am with my medal. I'll have to put it up in my office with my others. I'm starting t get a pretty good collection now.

June 29, 2005

Today was the 230th anniversary of the U.S. Army Chaplaincy. The Chaplaincy was started in the year 1775. It's the 2nd oldest branch of the military. We drove up to the Reigious Retreat Center for a barbeque that they were having for all of the Chaplain's and Assistants. He is Chaplain Horovitz being introduced.


Jung and I got a little bored and took some stupid pictures of each other.


....In deep though.

July 29, 2005

Today we drove up to Camp Casey and Camp Hovey to see soldiers that we have up there. Camp Casey is pretty close to the DMZ line, and there really isn't much to do there. Today it was reaning like hell. I have never seen so much rain in one day in my life. There was a lot of flooding and it never stopped all day long.


This water way normally never has water in it, or very little. As you c an see, there was quite a bit today. All of this water was from the first few hours that it started raining. That is how hard it was raining.


We saw this dog at one of the buildings that we visited. His name is Spike (how original) and he is the office mascot. Some soldiers found the dog somewhere near the base and brought him with them.


On the base they had a "Mean Gene's Burger's" restaurant. For those of you who don't know who Mean Gene is, he is an announcer that has been working for WWE Wrestling entertainment business for a long time. He opened up his own restaurant in Camp Casey, Korea.

June 27, 2005

Today we continued our visitations. This is what we do every day during the exercises. Today we headed up to Camp Madison, which is a tower at the top of a mountain. The can see the tower in the background at the top of the mountain.


There is a base at the bottom of the mountain with steps that go to the top. It's a very rough climb up to the top and it will wear you out. I hate climbing that hill. Luckily for us, today there was noone up at the tower so we didn't have to go all the way to the top.


Here is Chaplain Horovitz, Jung, and myself at Camp Madison.


On our way back home we made a detour and went to K-16, another base. We stopped by the air hanger and visited witht eh pilots there and handed out some religious literature and cookies to them.


Here is Jung chatting with one of the KATUSA's who work at the hanger.