In my Military career, several long BS sessions have gone under the bridge and some may have even been true. Take these or leave them, some may have happened like I am going to tell them but they have been filtered through a faulty memory and time passing.
One Guy from Paola, KS had a wife and a girl friend. He would supposedly go out drinking with his buddies but his wife never saw him at the local taverns. One night she followed him as he went out and saw that he went to a single lady's house that was well known in the community. Several hours later, the guy came home drunk and smelling of the woman he had been visiting. The wife took a tube of super glue and glues the offending member to his leg. When he woke up to go to the bathroom, he was very surprised. He got dressed and went in his car to a hospital in Olathe where he was sure that no one knew him. Low and behold the ER Nurse was one of his wife's best friends. Evidently the solvent that removes super glue is also so strong that it will really do a number on skin in sensitive places. Needless to say, he was met at the door of his home with a restraining order and the filed divorce papers as he limped up to the door.
One of my best friends in the Military was such a wise guy. We lived in a very small town and he decided to drive himself to the doctor the day he was going to have a vasectomy. When he got home, he came walking up the drive very slow and his wife came out and asked him if he was alright. In his highest Falsetto voice, he said "Oh, I'm fine."
One of my friends once also decided to have a vasectomy and did not heed his doctor's advice. Most Doctor's will tell you to go home, get a nice ice pack and watch a movie or two. My friend decided to go play golf with his friends. I am not sure what hole it was on, but when the swelling got very bad he finally went home and tried to get the swelling to go down. It took a trip to the local Emergency Room to drain off the bleeding that started on a backswing. Bummer.
The other day I was in a specialty store in Lawrence and saw the entire shelf of canned sea food. Smoked oysters and capers, sardines, clams and tons of other things I have never tried. I was immediately transported back to a day in Vietnam. We were out in the middle of nowhere and the unit commander wanted to send out a dismounted patrol and the recon Sergeant I had wanted to go with the Mortar FO and there was no need for me to go. As we sat there in the sun relaxing, one of the guys asked the guys if they would like to share some of his goodies he just got from home. It was an assortment of canned sea food and when we opened the cans, they were very salty so someone offered us a couple of cans of hot beer. Never was I ever so sick. I am sure it was the hot beer.
Once we were in the field at Fort Riley and on an overnight field problem. About the time most people would have had a pretty good start on a night's sleep, One of the guys rummaged through his pack and found a couple cans of sardines. They were nasty and stunk up the place. He ate and then just left the cans there by his bunk. I am not sure who, but someone during the short night woke up and put the cans of oily sardines in his boots. I am sure that he wondered who they bad guy was all the next day when every time he met one of us we would say, "Do you smell sardines?"
Speaking of silly things that happened when we were in uniform, we had a Field Grade Officer in our unit that could not stand the sight of needles. We would always take him into a class room and sit him down if shots were involved. One day we were getting updates on our shots and he was due the TB test. That's where they take little metal stick with a very small point and tap it on your arm to help the TB germs get in and if you had been exposed to TB, it would swell up. No swelling, no problem. No one even gave it a thought about the Major's aversion to needles. As soon as he saw one of the guys in the line get that slight poke, he fell down like a polled OX. The good news was that we were only a couple of blocks from the ER at the local Hospital.
One year we were at Fort Carson, Colorado and were given a base camp in a fairly desolate area. The Major in the pervious story had brought a small carpet to put by his bunk so he could put his boots on without getting his socks dirty. Back in those days, we had blousing rubbers which were just little green bands with a hook on each end that would hold our pants legs up on top of our boots. As he picked up one of the rubbers, the hook on the end got hooked up on a loop in the rug and when he pulled it, it came loose and he was just sure that he had been snake bitten. He was standing up on his cot afraid when someone noticed the blousing rubber there on the rug where he dropped it. Much laughter over that one...
At the end of one of our summer camps, we had a party at the Officer's Club. We had a tradition of mixing a helmet of Artillery punch and passing it around the room and the junior officer had the task of finishing it. That same camp, one of my friends, who was the cheapest guy I had ever met bought a fifth of whatever rotgut was the cheapest at the Class VI Store. He was supposed to send it to one of the guys on post who had done him a favor. When the guy opened the sack and saw that it was old rot gut, he instantly sent it back with a Thanks, but no Thanks card attached. Being the good guy I was, I helped my friend drink that whiskey as it was passed around. In about 15 minutes, I had to go get sick. I almost immediately went back to our BOQ where I promptly went to bed. The next morning, I woke up pretty sober and feeling like I could survive the long convoy home. The rest of the officers in the battalion were still in pretty bad shape and I had to sit at the convoy Start Point and dispatch the units out as most of the convoy officers were still so drunk and hung over they couldn't function.
Well, that's the long and the short of it. Have a great day.
MUD, teller of short tales.
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