Convoy of Snakes – An Ode to Military Humor

If you have read some of my most recent posts, you know that I have been writing about my experiences after leaving the Logistics Executive Development Course at Fort Lee, Virginia.  Well, I graduated from the Logistics Executive Development Course in due course, and my family and I headed for Fort Huachuca, Arizona.  Thus, I am left the Logistics Executive Development Course and Fort Lee, Virginia, behind.  If you want to know more about those subjects, you will just have to go back and revisit the posts on those subjects.  If you have been reading my most recent posts about my adventures after moving to Arizona, you found out what happened when I initially signed in at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.  I subsequently revealed to you that I had been assigned to the Joint Interoperability Test Center (JITC) at Fort Huachuca.  JITC is a subordinate command of the Defense Information Systems Agency.  You may have read about an interesting situation with a temporary guard.  In that same post, I also talked about securing housing for my family.  That secured post housing and how spiders rained from the ceilings.  Oh yeah.  That was quite entertaining.  Not.  I then switched gears to talk about some of my volunteer work on Fort Huachuca.  Oh yeah.  That was quite fun and interesting too.  I was volunteered by my unit to be a tax officer to help soldiers and their families prepare their taxes.  Yay.  I discussed how I helped my Master Gunnery Sergeant and his dependapotamus spouse prepare their personal income taxes.  I talked about where my quarters were located on Fort Huachuca and how I was introduced to the local chapter of the Hash House Harriers.  I talked about an incident that happened soon after I assumed my tour of duty at the Joint Interoperability Test Center (JITC) at Fort Huachuca.  This particular incident occurred one Monday morning soon after I arrived at work.  For more on that particular incident and my first NCOIC, Master Gunnery Sergeant Orr, please visit that post.  In still another of my most recent posts, I wrote about my efforts to secure a farewell award for my NCOIC, Master Gunnery Sergeant Orr.  I wrote in that post that there would be two farewell posts about Master Gunnery Sergeant Orr.  Well, since the first post was about his farewell award, obviously, my most recent post had to be about his actual farewell and his plans after life in the military.  Today’s post takes place as I was arriving at work one Thursday morning about three weeks after Master Gunnery Sergeant Orr had left Fort Huachuca.  It is at this point that it would be a good time to insert the fact that I had been working without an NCOIC since Master Gunnery Sergeant Orr had retired from the service and left Fort Huachuca.  He had only been gone three weeks, at that point, but it was obvious that I wasn’t getting a replacement NCOIC anytime soon.  Oh well.  That’s the way shit happens in the military.  But I digress.  The subject of today’s post isn’t about the lack of an NCOIC.  Oh hell no.  Rather, it is about a spectacle strange to behold.  In fact, some might say something rather mystical or mythical.  Was it really all of that?  Well, that depends on your perspective and just exactly how vivid your imagination really is or was as it were.  As I approached the guard shack outside of the tactical testbed at JITC, I noticed a large crowd of people standing in the dirt a few feet away from the access road leading to the tactical testbed operations building.  The access road was paved with asphalt and that is a key and essential point that you should pay close attention to for the remainder of this story.  It appeared that everyone was staring at a rather long camouflage conduit pipe of some sort.  From my vantage point.  I couldn’t hazard a guess as to how long that conduit pipe might be.  However, after I entered the guard shack, I noticed that it wasn’t a conduit pipe at all.  It was actually a long row of rattlesnakes lined up head to tail along the curb adjacent to the asphalt access road.  There appeared to be seven or eight rattlesnakes in that row.  They formed a convoy or conduit, if you will, of snakes.  Obviously, since it was still rather early in the season, they were just seeking heat.  Cuz you do realize that they are some cold-blooded bastards.  I mean that quite literally.  That doesn’t mean that they won’t bite you if you get too close.  Cuz they just might.  Bite you.  The only thing that was uncertain in this situation was whether they could actually coil and strike.  However, I certainly wasn’t going to find out by “testing the waters.”  And I noticed that nobody else was very eager to “test the waters” as well.  Go figure.  Well, the convoy of snakes that formed a pipe lasted until midmorning when the temperature heated up to what must have been an acceptable point to warm the snakes up.  Then that convoy of snakes moved out without any further exercises in futility.

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