Almost 36 years ago, my father won the lottery. The draft lottery. Instead of being drafted into the Army, he chose to honor a family tradition and joined the Air Force. So in 1971, he enlisted and was sent of to Basic Training in San Antonio, TX then flight school in Denver.
After all that, he trained for various things he would encounter on his tour in Viet Nam. One of those things was jungle survival. It is something he talks about humorously now, but at the time, I’m sure it probably wasn’t so humorous. For instance, my father hates snakes. Hates. Them. Obviously, if your in jungle survival training, snakes are going to come into play at some point. So he really wasn’t looking forward to that at all. As it turns out, there was someone in his group even more afraid of snakes than he was.
While in school, there were shown a variety of snakes. The ones that were poisonous, the ones that were deadly, and the ones who were harmless. Good training right? Anyway, during one stretch of training, they were turned loose in groups and had to spend a couple of days out in the jungle with basic survival gear and nothing else. Guess who got paired up with my dad? Yep, the pussy who couldn’t handle snakes. If I recall correctly, he was a Captain.
The first night, this Captain decides he’s putting his hammock way the hell up in a tree. Now, I’m no jungle expert, but I’m pretty sure snakes climb trees. But this isn’t about me. Anyway, the Captain gets all settled in, has his machete tucked by his side and all his belongings placed strategically around him, and falls asleep. The rest of the group follows suit and goes to sleep.
At 3:45 a.m., the guys on the ground hear a blood curdling scream “SNAKE! SNAKE! There’s a fucking SNAKE!” They see the Captain jump down from his perch and start swinging the machete left and right. It’s pretty dark, but the guys are all jumping out of his way as he proceeds to go ballistic because of this snake. At some point, a couple of training officers showed up and took control of the situation.
As the sun started to rise, the group got it’s first look at the devastation caused by the Captain. He literally cleared about a 10 foot radius of growth, butchered his hammock and generally made a mess of anything he came into contact with. While the crew went about salvaging their stuff, someone noticed the Captains watch. A few guys were standing around admiring this obviously expensive piece of man jewelry when someone happened to notice the numbers on the face light up when the hands are over them. It turns out the Captain saw his watch in the middle of the night with a lit up 3 and 9, confusing it with, you guessed it, two glowing snake eyes.
Last Friday, I watched a documentary on HBO about a M.A.S.H. unit in Baghdad. I thought of this story and how W reminds me of the Captain, swinging his machete blindly at two glowing eyes insisting they do indeed belong to a snake…
