Stuck in Korea

Fool 

I've been thinking a lot about the A-Team recently and come to the conclusion that Sgt. Bosco "B.A." Baracus is an idiot. Hear me out...

As we all know, he's afraid of flying. So how the hell did he get to Vietnam in the first place? I don't think there were any troop ships, so either he swam or they drugged him. Also remember that he was part of a crack commando unit, which I assume did lots of special forces stuff behind enemy lines and all that. You notice that everyone got transported around by helicopter?

"I ain't flyin' on no chopper, fool!"

Right there, refusal to obey orders. And they say he didn't commit a crime. Of course there could have been the drugging option just before take-off...

"I told you I ain't flyin...milk? Yeah, I like milk. I drink milk."

But this way you're going to have a very groggy soldier on your hands - a bloody liability to a crack commando unit deep in the jungles of Vietnam. You would have thought after the first 20 or 30 times he'd catch on. Or develop a fear of milk rather than flying. A quick note - the unit consisted of Colonel Smith, Lieutenant Peck, Captain Murdock and Sergeant Baracus. Does anyone else think the command structure here is a tad top heavy? Also they never killed anyone when they worked as soldiers of fortune, so what do you think their kill count was in South-East Asia? I'm beginning to understand how America lost the Vietnam War.

Either way B.A. couldn't have been a very good soldier. Or Face for that matter. Can you picture that smarmy lounge lizard fighting in Vietnam? Yeah, right. And Hannibal reached retirement age during World War 2. Which leaves Murdock, who's a nutter. This is your crack commando unit then. The cream of the U.S. military.

Anyhow, back to B.A. and his brainlessness. How many bloody times did he fall for the drugged sandwich/milk thing? The fact that the next mission is in Columbia and the team have all stopped for a picnic at an airstrip would be a pretty good indicator that something's rotten in Denmark. But no. Plus he still considers them his friends! All the druggings and abductions in Vietnam and America and he still trusts them.

B.A.'s a fool. We should all pity him.

Everywhere you go in Korea you are assaulted by a saccharine-sweet obsession of puppies, kittens and little chicks. Pencil cases, notebooks, t-shirts, bags, mobile phones - it's inescapable and nauseating. Women sport small dogs as accessories. Little rat-sized ones (nothing that can't fit in a stylish handbag) which are strategically trimmed and then dyed. Yes, you read that right. Dyed. All the colours of the rainbow.

And as spring arrives and the land is reborn once again, this is marked by women standing outside school playground selling chicks to the children. Live chicks. In cups. This sounds sort of cute and adorable but for the fact that children, flush with the joy and energy of just having finished another school day, are a tad careless.

"Look! I've bought a little baby chick!"

"Aaaaawww. So cute! Hey, do you want to play football?"

"Wait a minute, I'll just put the chick in my pocket and then we'll kick off..."

Cue one dead bird.

Many don't even survive the hundred metre walk from school to my academy, but there are still enough chirping birds to make a lesson unteachable. Any chicks that make it longer than 2 or 3 days would be considered a miracle, especially considering that most of the kids haven't understood that the prerequisites for life are warmth and food. There are stories about someone having raised one successfully where it laid lots of eggs and so on, but I think they're the Korean equivalent of "There was a kid at my school called Richard Head. Seriously."

So essentially every year there is the mass negligent slaughter of baby birds in order to entertain the children for a day or two. I'm guessing there isn't a Korean SPCA. Or maybe it's an attempt to educate children about the value of life - a lesson they annually fail to learn, evidently.

There's a fish season in the summer as well.