Thunder and Lightning – 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.   In my most recent post, I talked about a strange spectacle that I beheld as I arrived for work one morning.  If you want to know the details about that spectacle, you will just have to read that post.  In my most recent post, I shifted gears and talked about a couple natural phenomena that occur at Fort Huachuca during the summer months.  Well, actually I only talked about one of those two phenomena.  I talked about the wind.  Naturally, since I talked about the wind in my most recent post, it only makes sense to talk about the other phenomenon in this post.  The phenomenon that I am going to talk about today is the phenomenon for which the Huachuca Mountains and Fort Huachuca are named.  The name “Huachuca” is derived from an American Indian language (the Sobaipuri) and is usually translated as a place of thunder.  The Sobaipuri Indians described their village at the base of the Huachuca Mountains as a place of thunder.  That is so true during the summer months when Fort Huachuca and the Huachuca Mountains experience a phenomenon they call the monsoons.  The summer thunderstorms that frequent the region loosely resemble a monsoon pattern of rainfall.  Hence the name monsoons.  That first year I was in Arizona, more specifically at Fort Huachuca, I didn’t even think about the implications of thunder or what that phenomenon meant.  But here is what it meant in real terms.  Daily sunny mornings with rapidly building humidity toward midafternoon.  As the humidity built, the clouds in the sky also began to gather.  Then, the thunder began to rumble.  Not long after, the lightning would chime in and provide a spectacular light show.  Bear in mind that this was a daily occurrence in the summer.  You didn’t always get rain out of those thunderstorms.  But you sure as hell got a lot of noise (the thunder), and one helluva light show (the lightning).  The only thing about the lightning was that you didn’t want to be out on the golf course with your favorite golf club iron in your hands when the lightning decided to strike right in your neighborhood.  But what I hadn’t considered was the simple task of changing the oil in a vehicle.  Changing the oil in a vehicle is a pretty mundane task.  It’s a pretty simple task that kills about 20 to 30 minutes.  If you really, really take your time.  I enjoyed changing the oil (or so I thought) in my red Chevy van because the oil was so easy to change.  The oil filter was very easy to get to and change.  I had a drain pan to make things tidy and clean.  I could even fit underneath the van while laying on a piece of cardboard in the driveway under the carport, just in case it did actually rain.  So, there I was on a Saturday afternoon changing the oil oblivious to all of the thunder and lightning booming and flashing around me.  Suddenly a lightning bolt struck the transformer across the street from my house and lit up the neighborhood for days.  Sparks were flying everywhere.  If it hadn’t been pretty wet that summer, those sparks may have set off several fires.  As it was, no sooner than that lightning bolt hit the transformer, I felt one helluva jolt of electricity jump from the wrench that I was holding in my left hand which was attached to the oil drain plug on the engine of the Chevy van to my hand.  The jolt shook me so hard that I banged my head against the cross member of the van.  It seemed like hours before I was able to let go of that damn wrench and get out from underneath the van.  It was actually probably only a couple of seconds, but it seemed like hours.  That jolt shook the piss out of me and scared the hell out of me.  I can’t really grasp the feeling that you get when you get juiced like that except to say that it felt like the inside of my brain got cleansed.  Every hair on my body got knocked straight, and I felt like I was in this altered state for a while afterwards.  Needless to say the oil in that Chevy van didn’t get changed until Sunday morning right after church.  I was not taking any more chances with the lightning.  Oh hell no.  I had seen the light as they say.  I was finally successful in changing the oil in my Chevy van with no further exercises in futility, other than one helluva jolt from thunder and lightning.

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