It’s week 3 of boot camp in the South Korean Marines. Range week! Or rather, more like range half-week, followed by classroom half-week. For our sister training company it was classroom half-week followed by range half-week.

But who cares? The point is we finally got to shoot the old ass K2 rifles we’d been carrying around for the last half-month, and do what we came to do when we joined the marines. Shoot guns. Fuck yeah. Didn’t matter that these were the same guns our dads carried in the 80s. These were our rifles, our girlfriends, and we loved them.

Pre-departure inspection in the barracks before we march 5km to the range. The DIs would scream out a piece of gear (“Ballistic helmets!”), and us recruits would reply by giving said piece of gear three thumps and screaming back (“Ballistic helmets, no problems!”). And so on we went down the list of all the kit we should at this stage have on our persons.

Now a quick note about language. In Korean, when we scream “no problems” what we’re saying is 이상무 or Ee-sang-moo, which literally means no problems. Which is why the translation sounds so awkward to an Anglophone military man because that’s probabaly not how you’d vocalize that sentiment in English. But the detail is important to the story which is why I didn’t translate it across military lingo and simply went for a literal translation.

Because, you see, there was a recruit in my platoon who by a hilarious coincidence was named:

이상무

or Lee Sang Moo. Sang Moo Lee for those of you who are used to last names being last. Yup. His name was pronounced exactly the same as the phrase we used to report “no problems” (the L in Lee is a product of romanization and not pronounced in the original Korean).

As we’re doing our equipment check (“Magazines!” “Magazines! No problems!”). Suddenly the DI stops in his tracks, frozen, and every recruit within direct line of sight also froze, because oh shit we don’t know what’s wrong but we done fucked up.

DI: “HEY! LEE SANG MOO!!”

All us recruits, thinking that the issue was that we simply hadn’t screamed loud enough, decided to rectify our failure by calling upon our deepest reserves of fear and rage. “MAGAZINES, EE-SANG-MOO [no problems].

“NO!!” shrilled the DI, his face sweating and voice basically gone from the exertions of terrifying a bunch of South Korean man-children into something beginning to approach that of a resemblance of a shadow of marines. “I SAID LEE SANG MOO!”

Something about boot camp just turns you stupid. It’s a phenomena that I’ve long observed. Anyways, naturally we all just thought that we hadn’t screamed loud enough so we screamed even louder: “MAGAZINES!!! EE-SANG-MOO [no problems]!!!”

“AAAAAeeeeeeTTTT!!” screamed the DI in a fit of rage. “All of you, get down!!”

“ACK!!” we all barked as we got down into push-up position. Clearly, our best efforts hadn’t been loud enough.

“Except for you, Recruit Lee Sang Moo. Extend your rifle over your head. You will assume the duck walk position and follow me until I say otherwise. If you fail to keep up I will destroy you!”

Realization dawned on our faces, and a few suppressed giggles and snorts could be heard down the line. Those quickly died off as the push-ups started.

To be fair, the whole debacle was kinda the DI’s fault for not specifying Recruit Lee Sang Moo. But C’est la Boot Camp.