Carabao – An Ode to Military Humor

My recent adventures have been about a vacation that my family and I took to the island of Guam immediately after I had relinquished my position as the Commander of the 305th Supply and Services Company.  My family and I decided to spend some time cooling our jets while catching up on some much needed rest and relaxation.  Of course, you may already know that.  You may even know how we traveled to Guam using the low-budget method of transportation known as Space-A (space available) transportation.  Naturally, it had its own little quirks that we had to deal with such as not being able to catch a direct flight to Guam.  Then, there was the minor little issue with the cargo plane seats on the flight from hell.  Or how about our temperamental car rental that seemed to decide when and where it needed to take a break.  Or about the wild pigs and the coconut crabs, and our fruit picking exercises.  Most recently, I talked about a couple of our tourist trips around the island.  Including some island luaus or traditional island picnics where my family and I ate free food pretty much the whole time that we were on Guam, courtesy of my First Sergeant from the 305th Supply and Services Company and his relatives that lived on Guam.  So, last time I mentioned that I wanted to share with you about one last example of Guam’s weird wildlife.  That’s right.  I have talked about coconut crabs and wild pigs and even flying foxes.  But this last critter that I want to talk about is a water buffalo except that it is not called a water buffalo in Guam.  Oh no.  They just couldn’t possibly call it something as mundane as a water buffalo, so they had to come up with the name Carabao.  The only reason that I even knew that Carabao or water buffalo (as I like to call them) even existed on Guam was because one of my kids (don’t rightly remember which one) happened to spot one.  While we were driving along during one of our tourist trips.  The Carabao that my child happened to spot was standing in a clearing near the road beside a marsh or, for lack of a better word, wetland.  When my child spotted the Carabao, the question arose, “What is that daddy?”  So, naturally, I had to stop the car and ask the obvious question, “What is what?”  Seems pretty plausible, doesn’t it?  To which I got the almost obvious reply, “That, daddy.”  No, it wasn’t ‘that daddy’.  Cuz there was nobody’s daddy standing anywhere.  But now both of my kids were pointing at something.  Then I spotted it.  The proverbial elephant in the China shop.  The water buffalo that was just standing in the marsh about fifty yards away from the road.  If it had been a snake, it would have bitten me.  It was only later that I learned that they don’t call water buffalo by the normal name on Guam.  On Guam, they call a water buffalo by the name Carabao.  Okay.  So they just had to be special.  They just had to have their own name for a water buffalo.  Okay.  I could live with that.  However, what I could not live with was the fact that I could never get a straight answer for how the water buffalo got to Guam.  Pretty much everybody said that the Carabao was not native to Guam and that it had come from the Philippines during the Spanish occupation over 400 years ago.  What nobody was sure of was how.  Did the damn things swim?  If they did, that would’ve been one hell of an Olympic event to witness.  Cuz the distance between the Philippines and Guam is one helluva long way.  How far is that?  Well, let me tell you.  There ain’t nobody out there trying to set Guinness book of world records for swimming the Pacific Ocean between the Philippines and Guam like they are for swimming the English Channel and shit like that.  It just ain’t being done.  Does that mean it’s impossible?  Well, nothing is impossible.  But it’s pretty got-damn improbable.  What with all the shark-a-gators and crock-a-snakes and all the other kinda bad critters (I hear tuna can be pretty vicious) out there trying to eat you and shit.  Not to mention that you would have to pack all of your own food and water for the journey.  Hell, just the weight of that shit might drown you.  Yeah.  It’s pretty damn near impossible to make a swim like that.  So, if the bastard’s didn’t swim, did they fly?  Other than the experimental flying machine that Leonardo da Vinci drew up 700 years ago, I’m pretty sure that winged flight still only existed for birds 400 years ago.  Plus, I didn’t spot any wings on the one water buffalo that we happened to pass by.  So, I am pretty damn sure that they didn’t fly.  And a quick check of history confirmed my suspicion that there was no massive land bridge between the Philippines and Guam that happened to collapse into the ocean in the intervening years.  Thus, they sure as hell didn’t just walk there, unless they pulled a Jesus and walked on water.  That would have been interesting to see as well.  I was informed that there were a bunch of wild Carabao roaming on the Navy base, but I never went out to check it out.  The fact that we happened to spot one Carabao standing near a road that we could see was good enough for us.  That helped us to learn more about the weird critters living on Guam.  All the while, we experienced no exercises in futility, but maybe just a little confusion.

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