With Sean K., who is still one of my best friends today, we went on the 5th SFG together, then behind the fence with Delta and finally on to 1st SFG before he retired as a Team Sgt. He now works for another government agency and is still serving. That’s a healthy retirement check eh?
Sean would lace his coffee with Sweet & Low in the SF Code room. One day Tom Chambers, an SF Reservist and one of the funniest guys I ever met took a sip off of it, he went “WOW!” and started running around the building bouncing off the walls, all the while mumbling “K-Code, K-Code.” So, Tom thought it would be funny to open a bunch of Sweet & Low packets, lay long lines of them like coke and put a small sign that “Reserved for Sean K.” We thought it funny and left the arrangement undisturbed. That afternoon BG Dave Barato chose to visit the schoolhouse. He looked at the lines and asked Phil Brown, “So who is Sean K.?” OOPS.
Joe B. was a great dude and everybody in the class liked him. If you spent two minutes with him, you’d feel the same. Joe was also the only black guy in our entire class. The puzzle palace cadre were always worried about Joe feeling isolated (he definitely was in the sense he didn’t have another black guy to talk to) and picked on (he definitely was not). Nobody cared, we were all looking rifle green as in the color of the SF beret. Joe was one of us and we were all tight.
So whenever a bean counter would show up to ask him how he was being treated, Joe responded that he fit in because he joined the Klan just to be like the rest of the crackers in the class. The brass never knew how to handle that. Yes, we were an eclectic group.
But I digress, “Get to the damn point already…right?” So, here we are, zipping along in a C-141, flying NOE (nap of the earth) over Texas, trying not to puke and we parachute into lovely Camp Bullis, which in the summertime had temps around triple digits by 9 a.m. Camp Bullis is right outside San Antonio but doesn’t quite have the charm that the city does.
After a beautiful parachute landing fall — something akin to a lawn and garden bag filled with 100 pounds of dog crap thrown off the roof of your house — we gathered up our gear and turned in our chutes and moved (waddled) off to go make commo.
The next morning, the heat out there (Deep in the Heart of Texas) by 8 a.m. was stifling. It was hotter than a two-dollar pistol. Our rucksacks looked like they would burst at any second if another matchbook was put in there. We got our marching orders; we had a long-ass movement to where we were supposed to set up and make our commo shots back to Bragg’s base station.
One of our guys, who we’ll call TL for our purposes here, was trying to motivate the rest of us. He was all full of piss and vinegar and hopping around saying his ruck didn’t weigh shit and we’re going to smoke this, yada, yada, yada. You get the idea. His two best friends, Lee and Bugsy, weren’t having any of it. “Shut the fuck up TL”, they cut him off.
After humping for a while, we took a break and rucksacks flopped into the hot-ass dirt. TL was chatting nonstop and talking smack about how this was nothing and how we were smoking this movement. As TL went behind a scrub oak to take a leak Lee had a brainstorm: He jumped up, grabbed a huge rock from the ground and stuffed it in TL’s rucksack. Not to be outdone, Bugsy grabbed another rock and together they pushed them into the top of TL’s ruck somehow and cinched it back up. We all watched soundlessly but were chuckling that he’d definitely notice as soon as he would put it back on.
Sitting beside me, Wally, another future Delta guy, smiled, “that’s some cold-blooded shit,” he said. We all cinched up and struggled to our feet. Everyone was watching TL. Lee put his finger to his lips to get us to be quiet.
As he lurched to his feet, TL hunched over to ease it up on his shoulders for a second. “What’s the matter Hee-Ro,” Lee asked him. “You lose some of your shit-talkin’ steam?” We all stifled a laugh. “Holy shit!” TL exclaimed. “I guess I shouldn’t have stopped, this fucker feels like it weighs 20 pounds more.” I’d say he was spot on there.
We only moved a short while when one of the guys had to stop to readjust something that was rubbing his back from the inside of his ruck. TL helped him and Lee and Bugsy took the opportunity to once again unseen put another rock in his ruck. This time he had to notice…right? Nope.
When we started off again, TL was no longer the voice of motivation and talking smack. Instead, he was lamenting what a lame-ass he was and that this was kicking his ass. Lee was about to tell him what had happened when a truck pulled up next to us and the cadre members got out to check on us and give us further instructions.
“How y’all doing?” Kenny Black, our senior instructor asked. At that point, TL did the rucksack flop and the extreme weight of his ruck coupled with the angle of the ground caused his head to go back a bit and he thumped it on the top of his ruck flap with an audible plop. A large rock slid out halfway from under the top flap.
“What the Fuck!,” TL exclaimed. He then proceeded to toss the rocks from his ruck onto the ground. “Lee you’re an asshole!” Lee, spit out a stream of Red Man and smiled that maniacal Bryan Cranston smile and then replied… “What?!?!”
Our group cracked up and our instructors joined in, which made the whole incident even funnier. We were almost rolling on the ground at this point. Kenny Black asked him, “what did you do to deserve that, did you piss in his cornflakes this morning?” TL was half-pissed off and half-laughing, “he’s supposed to be my buddy!”
“Buddy’s only half a word,” Black said. The cadre would ruck with us and switch rucks with one of the students to ensure we’d all carry the same weight. “I’m glad I never switched rucks with you,” Black said, shaking his head. “You ain’t the brightest bloke in the world, are you?”
Yep, that was an eclectic group of guys. Did we go through the last hard class as every other SF guy swears to? Nope, we went through the first easy one because we had the best group of guys anywhere — and in my house, this isn’t a subject for debate.
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