A Trip to Seoul, From the Archives

D. E. Larsen, DVM

There was a chill in the air as Truman, and I walked over to the motor pool in the dark.

“Who’s idea was it to leave at this hour?” Truman asked.

“They changed the time for the game, and if we are going to make it for the kickoff, we have to get on the road pretty soon,” I said.

“How many times have you driven a deuce and a half, Larsen?” the motor pool sergeant asked.

“Never,” I said. “But I had a commercial driver’s license before entering the Army. I have driven trucks on the farm since about the age of ten.”

“Will, the roads in Korea are a long way from the farm,” the sergeant said. “Where are you going at such an hour?”

“The 508th ASA Group is playing in the semifinals for the football league,” I said. “One of the guys from our shop is on the team. We are going up for the game.”

“You are going to be dodging ox carts and foot traffic all the way to Seoul,” the sergeant said. “And the traffic in the middle of Seoul will be like you have never seen before. You just have to lean on your horn at every intersection. Otherwise, nobody will pay any attention to you. This truck has these yellow rebar posts welded onto the front bumper’s edge; you will find them invaluable to knowing where you are on the road. If the rebar clears the papa-san, you are fine.”

“You make it sound like we are going to be dodging people the entire way,” I said.

“Like I said, Larsen, we are a long way from the farm,” the sergeant said.

Following the basic instructions, we were good to go and pulled over in front of the mess hall to load the crew up. It was before shift change for the operations building, but we had twisted the mess hall for an early breakfast.

“Okay, guys,” I said as I picked up a couple of bananas from the fruit stand in the mess hall. “We need to load up and get on the road.”

“I’m not in the shop, but I was wondering if I could ride along,” Bob asked.

“What do you mean you’re not in the shop?” I asked. “You’re in supply. Get your butt in the truck.”

Everyone was loading into the truck in front of the mess hall. Truman was waiting to secure the tailgate.

“Lauser, why don’t you ride up front with Truman and me?” I asked. “The seats are a little softer, and there is plenty of room.”

With everyone loaded up, we drove the half mile to the main gate and turned the truck down the main street of Anjeung-ri. The street was teeming with people. There was hardly enough room for the truck in the middle of the road.

“Hit the horn, Larsen,” Truman said. “Let’s see if they jump.”

I gave a short blast on the horn, and the road cleared as if by magic. That was our first lesson in driving the roads of Korea.

“We have fifty miles of this. I hope the horn holds up,” I said as we drove into the countryside of South Korea.

The people thinned out, but the ox carts seemed to be everywhere. In early October, we were in the middle of the rice harvest. There were several times when people would seem to appear out of nowhere. One old man stepped out onto the road, and the yellow rebar on the front bumper couldn’t have missed his elbow by more than an inch.

“That was close,” Truman said. “Where the hell did he come from?”

When we got close to Seoul, the ox carts thinned, and the people increased in numbers. I laid on the horn at every intersection. People and vehicles seemed to part in front of the truck and collapse behind it. Sort of like driving through a flock of sheep on an Idaho highway.

We arrived at the football field with plenty of time before the kickoff. The game was not much to watch, but everyone enjoyed the break away from the company.

“Watching these guys, I should have tried out for the team,” I said.

“I think Mr. Neal was happy to get Ed out of the shop for a couple of months,” Lauser said. “I don’t think he would have let you go.”

It started raining before the game ended, and many of our group spent the last couple of minutes back in the truck. The 508th lost by a couple of touchdowns.

I checked with Ed after the game to make sure he wasn’t planning to return with us.

“The coach is going to take me back tomorrow in a jeep,” Ed said. “That will be more comfortable than riding in the back of a truck.”

We loaded up and headed back to Camp Humphreys. Thinking we had the system for driving in Seoul down pat, we sailed through the first few intersections with the horn blaring.

Then the horn went dead. We could hardly move and ended up stuck in the middle of a large intersection. Six streets came together in a giant maze, and people swarmed from everywhere.

“What the hell are we going to do now?” I asked.

“I’ll show you,” Truman said. “You get ready to move this thing.”

Truman rolled down his window, crawled halfway out, pounded on the truck’s hood, and shouted at the top of his lungs. The way forward cleared almost as magically as if we had a horn.

With increasing rain, Truman was getting soaked, but he didn’t complain, and before we knew it, we were back in the countryside. The traffic was heavier than our trip up to Seoul in the morning hours. There were fewer ox carts and more people, but they were confining themselves to the edge of the road better because of the traffic.

As we drove south out of Suwon, we were in a line of trucks. Most of the trucks were loaded with large sacks of rice. The rain was heavy now. The highway was elevated on a dike passing through a long stretch of rice paddies.

Suddenly, the truck in front of us started braking, and he twisted this way and that way.

“What the heck is wrong with him?” Lauser said.

About then, we could see this guy rolling down the highway ahead of the truck. He had just been struck by the truck. The truck continued to fight for control and finally headed off the road and into the rice paddies some fifteen feet below.

As the truck went over the edge of the dike, his rear wheels rose high in the air. When the wheels came down, they struck the man, stretched out on the highway, squarely in his midsection. Splat!

“Oh my God!” Truman said. “Did you see that?”

In Korea, whenever there was a traumatic event, a crowd of people would appear, seemingly from out of the mist.

A hundred people surrounded us almost instantly. We were all out of the truck but couldn’t move through the crowd. I got back in the truck to watch as things unfolded before us.

Several Koreans stopped the first truck in the northbound lane. They folded the dead guy up, picked him up, and stuck him in on the floor of the passenger side of the rice truck they had stopped. And off the truck went, heading to Suwon with his dead passenger.

The crowd dissipated as rapidly as it had formed. Everything was back to the way it had been moments before the accident as if nothing had happened.

We looked at each other and shook our heads. Truman laughed.

“Check the back, and make sure we have everybody and the tail gate is secure,” I said. “We need to get home and unwind now.”

“Yeah, tonight might be a good night to have a purple Jesus party,” Lauser said.

“I don’t know. I think I will stop by Bob’s hooch and play with his new puppy,” I said.

“What’s up that?” Truman said. “The Koreans don’t have pets. Where did he come up with a puppy like that?”

“I don’t know, but it is sort of a touch of home,” I said.

The rest of the drive was uneventful. All the guys were happy when I dropped them off at the mess hall, just in time for dinner.”

“How did the trip go?” the motor pool sergeant asked.

“It went well until the horn stopped working,” I said. “And then when the truck squished a guy on the highway, the fun was sort of over.”

“Did you hit someone?” the sergeant asked.

“No, it was a rice truck ahead of us,” I said. “We just had a front-row view of the event.”

“You had me worried for a minute,” the sergeant said. “We would be buried in paperwork if you had hit someone.”

After finishing up at the motor pool, I went to the mess hall for dinner and then changed clothes and went to the village. I stopped at Bob’s hooch and played with his puppy for a bit before going to Duffy’s Tavern to drown out the day’s events.

The Last Cow in the Chute, from the Archives5

D. E. Larsen, DVM

I stepped through the small gate into the crowding ally behind the chute. Ag swung the tailgate open, and I grabbed the tail of this large Charolais cross heifer with my right hand. I worked my gloved left hand into her rectum. There was enough squeeze on her that she could bounce around.

I had been doing this for most of the day. We took some time for a lunch of a special soup Ag had made for the day. Homemade bread and a hearty soup would make the afternoon go faster. The most significant advantage of the lunch break was my left arm got a rest. 

In the big cattle country, a cow doctor might have herds of 400 cattle to check every day for a couple of weeks. Their arms became accustomed to the workload. For me, it was one or two herds a week, and most of those herds were less than 100 cows. My arm was in shape enough to do over a hundred cows, but I had to rest it every chance I could.

I was skilled at rectal palpation. Using my left hand, I would first attempt to retract the uterus. This would bring the uterus into the pelvic canal where I could feel along the entire length. I would first feel the membranes slip between my fingers when I pinched the body of the uterus near the bifurcation. If present, this slip was a positive sign of pregnancy. Then I would explore down each horn of the uterus to find an amnionic sac or a fetus. Based on the size of the amnion sac or the fetal head, I could age the pregnancy to plus or minus 3 days.

A uterus with pregnancy over 90 days duration could seldom be retracted. One could usually find a fetal head by sweeping your hand along the length of the pregnant uterine horn. After 120 days of pregnancy, the fetus was generally out of reach until very late in pregnancy. Aging a pregnancy after 120 days was difficult, and getting between plus or minus 15 days was considered the best one could do. Inexperienced veterinarians could miss the age by months.

The obvious benefit of pregnancy exams in a commercial herd was to enable ranchers to cull the cows that were not pregnant. In that way, they would avoid the expense of winter feed for those cows. On rare occasions, I would detect a problem in the breeding program by finding a high number of open cows. Most of those problems could be seen by adequate observation during the breeding season.

The primary goal was to have cows fall into a 42 – 84-day pregnancy window. Cows outside that window would be culled. This would select for productive breeders, cows who would become pregnant on the first cycle she was exposed to the bulls. Then those cows not pregnant on the first cycle would have a second chance at pregnancy. By culling cows who could not breed back with two cycles, we were able to condense the calving season to a shorter time. This would allow ranchers to concentrate their observation of the calving and render help as needed. Having the age of pregnancy helped in knowing just when a cow was due to calve.

Failing to cull a cow who was outside the prescribed pregnancy window selected for infertility. First, you would have one cow that was a problematic breeder, then 5 years later, you would have that one cow and three of her daughters. The ball game was lost then.

It obviously would take several years of work to arrive at the desired calving window. With Ag’s herd, we probably had over 70% of the herd calving in the first 21 days of the calving season. This was ideal, and it allowed for some elective culling.

Elective culling would allow you to cull individuals based on other factors than fertility. Cows with better milk production would wean calves with a higher weaning weight. Cows with poor udder conformation might cause a lot of extra work at calving and could be susceptible to mastitis. In any herd, there are cows with behavior issues, culling them would reduce stress on the rancher and on the herd.

I always told my clients to cull the last cow in the chute.  If you have 100 cows in the corral to work through the chute, there will always be the last cow. She is seldom last by chance. 

Ag never listened to me on this point. She had to large Brahman cross cow that was almost impossible to get into the chute. So difficult, in fact, that I had only checked her one time. We would try and try to get her in the chute.

“Let’s just forget her,” Ag would say. “She is always pregnant. She is too mean to not be pregnant.”

“I am telling you, Ag, you need to get rid of that cow,” I would always say.

And true to form, after 5 years, there was the old mama cow and then 3 of her daughters, all trying to be the last one in the chute.

Photo by Jorge Zapata on Unsplash

The Meat Fork

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“David, I want you to set the table tonight,” Mom said as I came through the door.

My shoulders slumped. I had just finished my chores at the barn. The table setting was women’s work in my mind.

“Where is Linda?” I asked.

“She will be late tonight,” Mom said. “Now you go change your clothes and clean up. Then, get the table set. Your father will want dinner when he gets in from the barn.”

There was no sense in arguing. I was stuck with the chore. I raced upstairs and changed out of my work clothes. Then I bounded down the stairs with a leap down the last four stairs as I tried to touch the closet floorboards over the stairs. One day, I would reach them. Gary thinks he is so big just because he can touch those boards.

“Should I set a place for Linda?” I asked Mom as I pulled the plates out of the cupboard.

“Yes, she could be home anytime,” Mom said. “Now get busy. I see your father and brothers leaving the barn now.”

I quickly set the plates around the table. Then, I grabbed the silverware and put a knife, fork, and spoon at each table setting. I grabbed a napkin and put it on each plate.

“David, that is not how we set the table in this house,” Mom said.

“I know, but everyone is going to pick up the napkin first,” I said. “Why does it need to go under the silverware?”

Mom just frowned. I quickly arranged things to her liking.

“Here is the platter of roast beef,” Mom said. “You get it on the table and then return for the potatoes and gravy.”

Finally, everything was on the table. Dad and my brothers were all washed up, and we sat down.

Dad picked up the meat platter.

“Where’s the meat fork?” Dad asked.

“David, you know we need a meat fork on the platter,” Mom said as I was halfway to the kitchen to grab a fork.

“We could just use our forks,” I said as I placed the meat fork on the platter.

“It’s just easier to use a meat fork,” Dad said.

Dinner was almost over before Linda got home. Then, we all had to sit and listen to her story about singing lessons.

“Where’s the meat fork?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?” Sandy replied.

“The meat fork,” I said. “There should be a fork on the meat tray.”

“Just use your fork,” Sandy said. “We never had a fork on the meat tray when I was growing up. If we did, it would never make it around the table.”

We hadn’t been married a week, and now I find out she doesn’t want a meat fork.

“There should always be a fork on the meat tray,” I said. “It just makes things easier.”

“Well then, you can just jump up and go get your meat fork,” Sandy said in a bit of a huff.

I jumped up, grabbed a fork from the drawer, and returned to the table. I gently placed it on the meat tray.

“And you can wash the damn thing,” Sandy said.

I did not reply. And I did make it a point to wash the meat fork before anything else was in the sink that evening.

A meat fork was on the meat tray at dinner the following evening. Sandy never mentioned the meat fork again. And the marriage survived.

Photo by Andrea Mosti on Pexels.