The Great Korean Chicken Wing War

A fierce skirmish was fought in the sleepy hamlet of Columbus, Georgia last night in which I was not only a witness, but also a participant. The battle took place on the messy fields of BW3, also known as Buffalo Wild Wings, a restaurant that caters to the hungry individual with a hankering for wings. This is where people come to eat good chicken wings without the distraction of cleavage found at other wing establishments (although I don’t mind the distractions, we were out for an eating war and I wanted nothing to interrupt the fight). The opponents were not long time rivals or age old religious zealots with opposing views, but comrades in arms with different allegiances; he represented the people of the round eyes and the slow and often lethargic Field Artillery branch while I represented the people of the squinty eyes and the mighty Engineers. The challenge was to eat 50 wings in a sitting, flavor of our choosing, and the prize would be bragging rights of which race and branch were superior.

I sized up the competition prior to the gauntlet being thrown down on this masticating face off to see the worthiness of my foe. Rob is maybe 150lbs soaking wet, and his skinny stature and demeanor does not make him look like a formidable eating threat. I myself am not much bigger than him, but secretly I had a crab leg eating contest victory under my belt and had also gone out three nights ago and plowed through a helping of 30 wings with room for more. In my mind I was assured an easy victory, but I quickly learned after the first 25 wings that if there ever was an eating hustler, Rob was the best. We kept pace with one another in the beginning. I stuck to my race roots and chose Spicy Asian as the flavor of my first batch of 25 while he went with the standard hot. We hammered them down, one by one, until the piles of bones stacked higher and higher on the table. Rob revealed that this wasn’t his first trip to the wing eating rodeo by actually sucking the bones dry of any meat, sauce, skin or cartilage. They were so clean that I believe you could have actually reconstructed 6 pairs of full chicken wing skeletons for a biology display from his pile of discards. Myself, not being one to eat much cartilage or wing knuckles, left a few smatterings of skin and the audience of Field Artillery officers made it a mission to point the discrepancies out. Despite the jeers, Rob and I continued to feast until we reached the halfway point with no signs of fullness in either of our eyes.

The next batch of 25 came out; Rob taking the milder route of spicy garlic and myself going for the hot flavor. My strategy was that the spicier the wing, the faster you have to eat them in order to control the heat. This plan of attacked worked well for me at first. I was clearly pulling ahead of Rob as he seemed to have shifted into a lower gear around the 30 mark. My advantage however did not last long. My mouth and my stomach were not agreeing to the rate I was eating as I ate wing number 38. At wing 40, I started to question the wisdom of this challenge with the vacancies in my belly disappearing quicker than I had anticipated. Rob and I both were at a crawl now. I looked and saw that he was 2 wings ahead of me and I felt slightly panicked. I started to make a strategic move by feigning signs of pain and grogginess to make him feel like his victory was secure. Cheers from his fellow FA officers made him slow his pace, but it was not slow enough. While his companions started to prematurely congratulate him on his victory, I sprinted forward and tried to catch him. Rob ate his last wing while I had two left. Since this wasn’t a race for speed, but for quantity, all eyes were on me for the finishing of the last two pieces of meat. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t hurting at this point, but I had to uphold the reputation of the all powerful Engineers, plus of all the Asian professional eaters everywhere. I ate the last two amongst cheers from the table. Because we both ate 50 wings each, there were demands of a tie breaker. Rob and I looked at one another and declared that we would settle for a tie because neither of us were willing to eat one tiny bit more, not even a wafer thin mint.

We returned to the bays at Benning while rubbing our full and aching bellies. Some of the FA officers declared Rob the winner since he cleaned his bones so well. How could this be when Rob and I had agreed to a truce? How could I get back to even level with Rob’s performance and prove that I could eat with the best of them? It took an Infantry officer to declare that if I ate a Krispy Kreme chocolate glazed, cream filled doughnut left from this morning’s breakfast that I could make up for the bits of gristle left on my bones. Well, my stomach objected to the notion all together, but I ate that sweet pastry of victory without even a protest from Rob.

This morning I woke up and rubbed the Buddha and questioned why in the heck did I do that last night? It’s not even like I can say I was drunk! And I know that it’s going to be painful when it’s time to download that lump of chicken that is snaking it’s way through my lower GI as I type this. I guess you can chalk this one up to pride, however foolish it may be.


In other news, I should be leaving Ft. Benning in a few days. I am trying to leave earlier than later, but the travel folks are fighting me on this one. All 30 of us are heading our separate ways this weekend, but I’m sure we’ll meet again in the sandbox in due time.