A Life Lesson

Forty years ago today, I was travelling through South Korea with a sack full of money over my shoulder and a .45 caliber pistol on my hip like a perverted Santa Claus. The experience taught me a valuable life lesson.

As the junior lieutenant in the US Army's fightin' 23rd Direct Support Group, I was assigned as December Payroll Officer. I went to 8th Army HQ in Seoul and received a duffel bag full of Military Payment Certificates (MPC), the monthly pay for several hundred servicemen scattered throughout Central Korea. MPCs were denominated in US dollars and resembled Monopoly money in that bills were of different sizes and garishly colored. They could only be converted to US currency if you had orders to depart Korea. The Army feared that GIs would convert "greenbacks" to Korean won on the black market and that US currency would find its way to North Korea where the bad guys would use it to purchase nuclear weaponry and the like (as if that could happen).

The Army pay system is nothing if not egalitarian. Every 2nd lieutenant with two years or less service was paid the same princely sum of $340 per month and so on up and down the ranks. The only payroll "extras" were combat pay, flight pay for pilots, "jump" pay for paratroopers, and "medical" pay for doctors and dentists.

There was only one guy left in line for pay at the 2nd Aviation Group and I had a pile of money remaining in that unit's stack. Had I shorted someone earlier? Was my next assignment breaking large rocks into small ones at the Leavenworth Stockade?

It turned out that the last guy was a paratrooper pilot dentist who had flown near the DMZ and got combat pay. He made more than his Commanding Officer though he deserved it. Imagine if you got a toothache from biting down on your paratrooper's knife while flying over the DMZ. He could fix it and still land the plane. The guy had taken advantage of all the loopholes in the Army pay system. I was envious, but mostly relieved that I hadn't miscounted the Monopoly money.

Wall Street paid about $115 billion in Year End Bonuses last week. Wasn't that sort of stuff supposed to end when we taxpayers bailed Wall Street out last year?

Here's the life lesson. No matter how foolproof the system, someone will figure out a way to take advantage of it. I wonder if my paratrooper pilot dentist is working at Goldman Sachs today.