Deer Merry-Go-Round – 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 while attending the Logistics Executive Development Course at Fort Lee, Virginia.  While at Fort Lee, I spent some time talking about finding a place to live, and we found a place in a trailer park in Petersburg.  And I mentioned in that post my sentiments about the manager of that trailer park.  But my family and I decided not to let that pickup driving, backwoods dwelling, varmint hunting, shotgun hauling trailer park manager interfere with our ability to get along and adapt to our new environment.  Even though we were treated as if we were “other-colored” people, we learned to improvise, overcome and adapt.  My son was getting along just fine and playing with his friends and time moved on.  Well, as I said, time moved on.  We all got integrated into life at Petersburg and Fort Lee.  Eventually, I got accustomed to life in Petersburg and Fort Lee.  You probably read that I would run through the woods surrounding the school where it was purported that Civil War battles had been fought.  I ran through those woods pretty much every evening after school without fail.  And you no doubt remember about the orchestrated run that was thrown together by the cadre at the Logistics Executive Development Course.  However, besides talking about running, I talked about country briefs and international politics involved in the course.  Or about being the target of a prank.  The prank was a promotion which never happened.  Yes, I was tricked into being wrongly promoted and then demoted in less than a week.  I also posted about the commanding general’s invitational deer hunt, where I got to be a swamp dog.  Yay.  That’s always exciting.  Not.  But most recently I finally relayed my theory of relatives.  My theory of relatives actually had nothing to do with my attendance at the Logistics Executive Development Course at Fort Lee, Virginia.  No.  I just threw it out there for your reading enjoyment because I mentioned it in an earlier post as something that I would tell you about at a later date.  The subject of today’s post is one of my experiences in the swamps of Fort Lee.  I spent a lot of time hunting deer in the swamps of Fort Lee during my time off.  Occasionally, I sat in tree stands and attempted to coax deer into my location.  I didn’t have much success with that effort.  However, once I got out of the tree stands and got into the actual swamps and thickets, I had better success.  Over time, I learned that it was best to hunt the swamps in a light mist because the deer didn’t like to move unless they were forced out of their bedding spots.  Not many hunters like to hunt in light rain and mist.  However, the rain and mist didn’t bother me because I had the proper wet weather clothing to protect myself from the weather.  The game management specialist at Fort Lee usually issued me game management tags for deer on rainy days when I went out into the swamps so that I wouldn’t have to use my actual deer tag if I filled a tag.  I managed to fill three game management deer tags by hunting the swamps during rainy weather.  My most successful hunt, however, came just before graduation.  I went out into the swamps with a friend.  I took him to the location where I had the most success in the past.  We started walking through the thicket and managed to kick up a small herd of deer.  There were about seven head of deer in the herd.  I signaled my friend to stop movement and we watched where the deer headed back into the thicket and bedded down.  We then pulled back and I explained to my friend how we should approach their new bedding spot.  We needed to come at the deer from two sides to envelop them in a trap.  It worked perfectly.  There was a pool of water right beyond where the deer had bedded down, so the deer ran away from me toward my friend.  When they sensed my friend, they ran toward me in a circular motion like a merry-go-round.  I fired a round and one deer went down.  A few seconds later, my friend fired a round and another deer went down.  Then, I fired a second round and the third deer went down.  My friend fired again but missed.  Then the remaining deer were gone.  Both my friend and I had filled our game management tags.  I had also filled one of my actual deer tags as well.  It took us a while to clean and field dress all three deer.  Then we carried the three deer a quarter-mile back to our vehicles.  We divided up to meat between us and left to go home.  After I quartered and butchered my meat, I drove to the Safeway store with the meat in a cooler and asked the local Safeway manager if he could store the meat in the store cooler for a couple of days until I graduated from school.  I gave him a couple of deer steaks for his trouble.  When we left Fort Lee to travel across country to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, I kept the deer meat in a large cooler on dry ice.  I managed to carry all of my deer meat with me across the country from that deer merry-go-round with no exercises in futility.

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