I hope everyone has been following Chas Coddington’s column in The Voice. It alternates an appearance in this space every week with mine because, for me, it takes that long to get anything coherent out of my head and on to the page.
The Chas has been writing about his involuntary military career. I’ve been reading his story with great interest, because he and I were both caught under the big olive-drab thumb of our dear Uncle Sam around the same time: The Vietnam Era. The Chas spent time at Ft. Sam Houston in Texas while I was ensconced in Ft. Hood in Texas, where the resident wildlife was similar.
The environment in and around Ft. Hood was just like the surface of Mercury. Between that and the prehistoric insects, it was as if I was in a real-life Starship Troopers (Search on Google if you’re inspired). Just like The Chas at Ft. Sam Houston, we newly-arrived GIs were warned to shake out our boots in case scorpions had decided to use them as a place to set up taco stands, and to watch out for rattlesnakes that liked to slither into sleeping bags at night to poison and replace our teddy bears. I had an office job in an un-air-conditioned, old-wooden building and was fortunate to get a motel-like apartment off post with my wife and mostly avoided shaking boots and sleeping bags. Our one-story apartment building was strategically next to a swamp, which provided an unending source of audible entertainment at night.
One morning there was a big commotion from the apartment next door where a sergeant and his wife lived. It seemed the lady of the house had gone into her closet to pick up a shoe and disturbed a scorpion nest inside. Hundreds of baby scorpions swarmed across the floor and took up strategic defense positions around the apartment. She and her husband had to wait outside in their robes until exterminators arrived and neutralized the situation.
Another couple in one of the other apartments discovered a scorpion nest under one of their bed pillows when the little rascals scurried out just as the couple rested their weary heads. Kiss those visions of sugarplums goodbye.
Our apartment was scorpion-free, although one night my wife woke me and said she heard something on the uncarpeted floor. I listened and heard a rapid “tik-tik-tik-tik.” It stopped briefly, then started up again, but appeared to be moving away. Being a highly skilled, well-trained killer and defender of my country, I had the courage to flip on the light to see what was making the sound. Headed out the bedroom door was the largest insect I’d ever seen (see the Starship Troopers reference above), so large that we heard it walking on the bare floor. Texans are telling the truth when they say everything’s bigger in Texas, which is one of the reasons I have no desire to live there.
After The Chas was inducted, he said he was asked if he’d rather go to Korea or Germany. If any of you dear readers have read my book, “The Militarized Zone: What Did You Do in the Army, Grandpa?,” available at a local library or online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble (cheap shameless plug), you read that I was told at Ft. Hood I was not going anywhere. No one had ever been reassigned from the position I held as special duty assignments clerk, so I’d finish my illustrious military career right there, barbecuing my body parts in the Texas heat. That situation lasted about four months. Troops were being reassigned to Germany, Korea, and Vietnam. I figured it wouldn’t be Vietnam because I wasn’t armor or infantry which were the majority of troops stationed at Ft. Hood. I’d desperately hoped for Germany with its cold beer and warm frauleins. No such luck. Korea, where it’s always cold and nasty and gray? No beer? No frauleins? If you’ve read my book, The Militarized Zone, etc. (fill in the rest of the cheap shameless plug yourself), you know how it turns out.
I did manage to get closer to a MASH unit than The Chas ever did. On my way north to the DMZ to see the Bob Hope Christmas Show, I snapped a picture of the last operating MASH unit in Korea. It gave me the sudden urge to have a dry martini with the ghost of Hawkeye and hit on a nurse.