Air Force Moped Drivers Fight Parking Rules After Spots Dispute

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A Parking Battle That Changed Base Rules

If you live or work in a place where parking spots are limited, things can get heated in a hurry. People battle for places to park their vehicles, and the story that follows shows how quickly things can escalate.

One Vehicle Per Parking Spot.

This tale takes place when I was assigned to a JTAC (Joint Terminal Attack Controller) unit at Osan Air Base in Korea. JTACs are Air Force personnel who embed with Army units to call in air strikes. The Army has a disturbing tendency to get themselves destroyed when calling in their own airstrikes. There’s more to it than that, but anyway…

We had mandatory PT (Physical Training) every morning at 0645 at the base gym. Most people on Osan lived on base, and not everyone was allowed to own a car. This meant parking was very limited at most places on base, and the gym had about 20 parking spots total. But since most people walked and we showed up really early, this was never an issue.

However, JTACs being JTACs, many acquired mopeds, which were much easier to get a permit for. Naturally, they were all painted in group-appropriate colors that made them instantly recognizable as belonging to someone in our unit.

It being Korea, we were constantly doing exercises around base defense and launching air missions while under all kinds of attack. As the JTACs didn’t really have a role to play in that fight (they’d be away from the base working with the army), they were often asked to be the opposing forces.

During one exercise, the JTACs called out a Security Forces (combination of police and base defense) Second LT for being unprofessional (I believe the term used to describe him was “Raging Jerk”). Nobody liked this guy…

This instilled a burning dislike in him for our unit and he wanted revenge.

Now, as I said, we had PT at 0645 and the cops had PT at 0700. The JTACs usually parked all of their scooters in a pair of parking spots, which meant they could fit all 8 or so of the things in a relatively tiny space.

One day after PT, we came out to discover that every moped had been ticketed because only one vehicle is allowed per spot, and our friend the Cop Lt was there to proudly explain the tickets.

I’m sure you can quickly see where this is going…

The JTACs then proceeded to occupy every single parking spot in the lot. Even people who usually walked from their dorms started to ride their mopeds over. That plus those with cars meant not a single spot remained.

Someone had to put a stop to this.

After about three days of this, the base commander intervened and amended the base instruction to say that multiple mopeds could be parked in a single spot.

We ended up hearing through the grapevine that although the Colonel was amused by the JTACs antics, he worked out at roughly the same time and suddenly found himself bereft of parking. He changed the rule to be logical, and the 2nd Lt got his hand smacked by his own commander and told to leave the JTACs alone.