Our 2 1/2 Ton Truck

8. We Discover some Cleaning Solvent, 1951

We Take a Trip for Gasolene On our radio Relay station we had a number of generators running 24/7. At some stations we had four 2500-watt generators running. These one-cylinder units can run only two hours and then had to be switched to new warmed up units and the old ones shut down. Then we must check the oil, add gas and get it ready for its next shift and so on. Every day I was in Korea that was our life. So we needed to take the 2 1/2 ton truck to get new supplies of gas from time to time. We got it in 55-gallon drums and after we got back to our station put it into five-gallon cans for transport to the top of the hill unless we were lucky to have a road to the top.

The Surprise one Day I took along several Korean Laborers with me when I went for gas because you had to load the drums yourself and those suckers are heavy, some 370 pounds. Well that day I went to the POL dump, showed my allotment pass and was shown to the pile of drums. Wow! What did I see? A 55-gallon drum labeled "Cleaning Solvent." I told my Korean crew to load that one first and hide it behind the drums of gas I was authorized to get. We checked out with no problem and away home to the station I went. Now you have to understand that we had been sleeping in sleeping bags for about one year at that point.
Our 2 1/2 Ton Truck
The Day of Reckoning We put the solvent into a big pot that we had and began to clean our sleeping bags one at a time. To my surprise the sleeping bags changed to a light brown color, from the old color of black. You have to understand we had been sleeping in them for a long time, especially in North Korea, with all of our clothes on. You don't take off your clothes when the temperature is 30-40 below zero. Sometimes we would even get in the bag with our boots on as well. And you didn't bathe too much nor often in those kinds of circumstances. Everyone was delighted to get their bags cleaned and we spent the whole day cleaning everybody's sleeping bags. We set them out in the sun to dry. When it became night we discovered the smell was too much to get near the bags. So everybody spent the next two nights sitting up. Eventually the smell dissipated enough so that we could get in the bags again. We shared the remainder of the solvent with other units.

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