Чего только народ не придумывает. И не жалко же времени.
Не хотел открывать новую тему. Интересный рассказ, который довёл меня до хихикания. А это непросто.
Our mode for sneaking into Jagoffia involved a rented,shrimp trawler with our rolled up Zodiac boats and gear dropping us about 10 miles off the coast from our beach landing zone. We inflate the boats and drive to a link up with our new allies, sounds not simple but doable. Before we could do all this water operating we needed a briefing about the dangerous marine life. Our medic 'Gorgeous' George told us of the dangers from sea snakes. Now George is from near Boston so he has that accent to start with, but he is also Portuguese so there is that flavor thrown into the mix. But, the kicker was that he dipped Copenhagen snuff about half a can at a time. Add this together and you have a completely incomprehensible individual. As he informed us of the dangers posed by sea snakes he stated in a mélange of accents that I will not attempt to reproduce, 'Now sea snakes are as deadly as anything on earth, but they can't bite you very easily because they have tiny little teeth. They almost gotta get a little flap of skin like between your fingers and gnorr on it.' Now the only word I changed was gnaw to gnorr. You have to hear that whole quote in the combination Boston, Portuguese, Copenhagen accent to truly love it, but once he said gnorr we all lost it. I asked the question on everyone's mind 'George, what the fuck did you just say? It sounded like you said the snake had to gnorr on you to hurt you.' 'Yeah that's right they gotta get a real little piece of skin and gnorr on it. They got little tiny teeth, that's all they can do.' He replied. I had to finish up with the question on everybody's mind 'Are you saying that the snake has to gnaw on us in order to hurt us?' 'Exactly' he answered, 'They gotta gnorr on ya'.'
We managed to navigate our way onto our home island without any gnorring related injuries. There we met up with our guerrillas and moved to the base camp. Our guerrillas, for this exercise, were Marine aircraft mechanics and our opponents were a Marine infantry unit portraying the military of Jagoffia. Actually, our opponents were a particularly famous marine infantry unit with two unit flags obtained during a noble exploit, their difficulty was that we had actually done extensive work under the canopy of this hellhole, and they had no clue how horrible the ground really was.
Part of guerrilla warfare is taking people with few combat skills, like our mechanics, and teaching them to fight and survive. Craig and I took a patrol out to practice some of theses skills and along the way we came upon the other famous island snake, Habu the pit viper. This sweet critter was also in George's briefing and we were informed of the nastiness of it's venom and it's inch and a half long fangs. When our point Marine froze and pointed to one coiled on a rock in a creek bed, Craig decided it was a good time to start his snakeskin collection. Somehow Craiggles had confused the sea snake and habu. He thought that habu was the one with the tiny teeth that had to gnorr on you. The Marines, who knew how dangerous the snake was, watched awestruck as Craig pulled out his K-bar and started poking at the viper. I could see some of this from my position at the back, but I couldn't believe the answer when I asked one of the Marines what was going on. 'Sgt. Lewis is killing a habu with his knife' came the reply. 'WHAT?' I hissed. 'Yeah, he told us to let him know if we saw any 'cuz he wanted the skin' the private informed me. 'Holy Shit!' was all I could manage. I hurried to where Craig was crouching down doing his best Crocodile Hunter imitation with the snake draped over his not very long knife blade. 'Drop it you fuckin' idiot' I told him. He flashed me his most charming, dumbass smile and said, 'Relax man. This is habu, remember 'they gotta gnorr on you' you know, George, all that shit.' 'Drop the fuckin' snake Craig.' I commanded, 'That was sea snakes that gnorr. THAT is a fuckin' habu with big fuckin' teeth.' Craig doing the best job of turning ghost white I have ever seen for a black man, promptly dropped the snake and jumped several feet backward. I then did the bright thing and dropped a BAR (big ass rock) on the snake, which up 'til then had been too amazed to bite the fool.
I grabbed Craig who was shaking pretty good and said, 'You are one lucky motherfucker. If that thing had bit you I think I might've just let you die 'cuz that was Darwin Awards quality stupidity.' 'Oh my God' was all Craig had left. 'Alright now get your shit together,' I told him, 'Those Marines think you did that shit on purpose. We've got the makings of an excellent legend here. These fucker's are gonna be telling the story of crazy Sgt. Lewis who kills vipers with a K-bar, for the rest of their lives. You gotta play this off like you meant it.' That was something Craig could buy off on, so he sucked it up and headed back to tell the troopies not to try this at home because we were trained professionals. He graciously donated the skin to one of the Marines who 'cured' it with salt from his MREs and made a hatband for his flop hat. The problem was once the story got out all our guerrillas wanted to be mighty, snake slayers and pretty soon our base camp looked like a taxidermy shop with hides tacked to every tree, most perfectly, harmless varieties.