Another boring blog entry
Been once again months since I annoyed all of you with this blog of mine....middle of the night again, and it’s hot as heck and who can sleep anyway......by the way...please do keep sending in your stories...this isn't my Thread...it's ours.....
It is getting fall….1976 and the unit has decided to go to the field, so away we go. Rainy and it just won’t stop. Someone has the bright idea of playing war games in the middle of the woods. One night, we spend in the pouring rain up to our waists in water, in a foxhole, trying to see if the “enemy” is creeping up on us to take us prisoner. The enemy has more sense than we do and stays somewhere dry for the night. Evidently the new commander has spent his night soaked too, so the war games get called off and we go to some new area to camp and make a mess of the woods. That night, it rains again and everyone has to find some place out of the rain to sleep. Not easy to do in the woods. Some of us ignore the orders we were given, and wait until the Commander goes to his tent and thinking we are smart, we get under that 2 ½ ton truck where it is pretty dry and try to get some sleep.
Now there’s a reason why all those dummies in the head shed had told us not to sleep under the trucks, but we didn’t find out what it was until about 4 o’clock in the morning.
About 4 or so….one of the fellows starts to make strange noises and it wakes some of us up. Naturally, someone tells him to shut the F**k up and let us sleep. He’s a stubborn idiot and keeps making his strange noises, until one of the fellows gets ticked off enough to turn his flashlight on and shine it in the jerks face. Suddenly the reason for the fellow’s noises became all too clear. The jerk had gone to sleep right under the forward transaxle and the housing was sitting right on his chest. The truck had sunk in the wet ground. Someone tries to pull him out and he starts to use very loud, bad language, more like a scream…and that isn’t good. Screams will wake up the bosses. Someone is bright enough to think of his entrenching tool (Shovel) and work starts in earnest. I get to hold a flashlight and try and talk him into not screaming….the ground is fairly soft, and by digging under him, we make enough room for him to be pulled out. The dummy has a big bruise on his chest, but he is otherwise unhurt. By general consent, we find somewhere else to spend the rest of the night……..
A day or two later, the squad gets some mission that takes them away from the rest of the unit and we are on our own. For some reason, the truck driver is driven back to the main group in a jeep and while he is gone, one of the fellows cuts his hand something awful. Blood all over the place…it’s hospital time. Now the truck driver has just left, but the truck is still there. The Sergeant calls us all together and while the fellow is standing there with blood running all over the ground, we all get asked if any of us has a licence for the truck. Now, no soldier gets a licence for anything that he doesn’t have to, as it means lots of extra work and details to pull…so everybody stands there and sort of looks somewhere else and doesn’t say a thing. Now the fellow is still bleeding and things are getting sort of desperate. So the Sergeant restates the question using different words.
“Let me re-phrase that…….Does anybody THINK they can drive the truck? A half a minute goes by. No one makes a move, except the poor sucker with blood running down his arm. Fool that I am…my hand goes up. After all..someone has to do it.
The trucks back then didn’t have keys for the ignition and luckily, the padlock was not locked, so we got in the truck and pushed and pulled stuff, until the motor sprang to life. But there is a loud hissing noise somewhere and I get out and look around. Sound is coming from under the truck, so I look and find the valve that turns out to be on the airline for the brakes. Lucky me. I get back in and put it in gear, sort of like the farm trucks I drove when I was 12 or so back home, but this one had doors, the farm trucks didn’t.
We made it to the main road and used the map in the truck to figure out which way to the city. There were trolley tracks all over the place once we got into town and there were a few near misses with that truck being so big and such, but we got there to the hospital, he was signed in and I drove the truck back to the field where the squad still was. I filled in the Sergeant, got asked if there had been any accidents and got told to keep my mouth shut about it. We returned to base a few days later and once again, like in the case of the famous bus trip…..I was told one morning to go to the motor pool and pick up my licence. Today…I wish I had kept the two licences after I got out of the military…good source of income….
There are some things that happen in everybody’s life, that change the way we look at things, and affect the rest of our lives. We see someone do something, and we decide never to do that certain thing ourselves. This roommate who liked to drive tractors, turned out to be one of them.
I came back to the room one afternoon and tried to put my key into the lock and turn it…a no go. That means someone is in the room and has put their key into the lock to keep someone from opening it up. As it’s the middle of the afternoon, and there can’t be some girl in there with one of my roommates at that hour…I knock on the door and I hear my roommate say something that didn’t make sense right away to me…it did though, pretty soon. “Is it cool?”, he says. Well…it is pretty cool in the hall, being winter and all, but that didn’t explain such a dumb question. So I say….”Whhaat?” Just like any logical person would. So the key turns and he sticks his head around the edge of the door, and says again in a whisper …”Is it cool?” I’m still not understanding the purpose to all this, but I answer back, “Yeah…it’s cool”, just to get him to let me into the room. Heck with his dumb question, or why he asked it.
I walk over towards my bed, and in front of the bed, is the coffee table with a couple chairs pulled up to it. I glance at the table, and here is where the alarm bells start to go off. The mirror from the wall is laying flat on the table and there is a big pile of brown crystalline stuff on it. He sits down and starts to crush this stuff up and roll something over it to make it into powder. My stomach turns and dreams of spending the rest of my days in some jail start going through my head. “Heck” just doesn’t quite fit the bill, but some pretty obscene words, started to form themselves on my lips…until I think about that fellow hanging out the window of the barracks down the street. I kept my thoughts to myself.
Now he has a nice pile of powder and stands up and goes to the corner post of the bunk bed we sleep in and with a tweezers, takes hold of a tiny thread that is sticking out from under the metal cap on the hollow bedpost, and removes the cap to the bedpost and pulls on the thread. I stand mesmerized and watch him pull the thread up and on the end of the thread is one of those things I can’t see today without thinking of him. A needle. He turns around and tells me it such a great place to hide needles, because if the Sergeant ever opens the cap to look in, the thread and needle will fall in the tube and never be found. “Smart thinking”, says I.
Now comes the worst part. He sits down because by then he’s shaking like a leaf, and pulls a spoon out of his pocket and bends it funny, and puts some water in it. Now he throws some of the powder in with the water and mixes it around, takes his lighter and heats the stuff up. I’m unable to look away, never seen anything like this, in my worst nightmares. He takes the needle and try’s to fill it up with the shit. By this time he’s shaking so bad that he has a lot of trouble doing it, but he finally gets the needle full. It’s a tremendous effort for him just to hold the needle and he is on the verge of tears. He can’t hold himself still long enough to get the needle in his arm and he starts to cry and beg me to hold his arm for him. I don’t know what to do but I just can’t seem to avoid it and I take his arm and hold it tight. I wish so bad to look somewhere else, but I can’t do it, I gotta watch. He sticks the needle in his arm, shoots the stuff in and a moment later the shaking and tears have gone, he’s back to normal. He packs up the rest of his stuff, hangs the mirror on the wall, brags about all the other hiding places he has in the room for his needles, and when he is finally finished, I get to go to the latrine and do what I have needed to do for the last ten minutes……throw up......
:evil: