If you have read some of my 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, Virginia. If you have read about my exploits at Fort Lee, Virginia, you no doubt read about my dealings with the commanding general. For example, the commanding general’s invitational deer hunt that I managed to get invited to participate in, as a swamp dog. Yay. Or about how the commanding general wrongly promoted and then demoted me in the same week. Double yay. But not all of my dealings with the general were negative. We had a love-hate relationship. I loved to hate him. But seriously, the old guy started to grow on me as time went on. Fort Lee started to grow on me as time went on as well. But all good things must come to an end and it was the same with the Logistics Executive Development Course. My class had finally entered graduation week. You may remember reading about the dining out that I talked about. Well, I mostly talked about stains in that post. You know. Food stains. Not the kind caused by food fights. Cuz those are a different kind of stains. You know. Those kinds of stains are deliberately caused. You may have read that the commanding general tried to con me into taking a teaching job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. He said that he had heard that I was interested in becoming an instructor at the Logistics Executive Development Course. While that was true, I wanted to become an instructor at Fort Lee not in Ohio. No way no how. There was no way in hell that I would sign up for a tour of duty in Ohio. Cuz let’s face it, Ohio is in the middle of nowhere. As a result, I graduated from the Logistics Executive Development Course in due course, and my family and I headed for Fort Huachuca, Arizona. If you were keeping up, you found out what happened when I initially signed in at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. What I didn’t tell you previously was 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. After I picked up my family and brought them to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, my first step was to find suitable housing. I signed my family into the Fort Huachuca guest lodge while I began to ‘in-process’. I reported back to Jack at JITC, and he gave me an in-processing check form. One thing became immediately clear. There was no checkbox on the form for the Central Issue Facility. I asked Jack about that. He informed me that the military people at JITC did not go to the field, so they did not need pioneer gear. I thought to myself, ‘Times are good. This is the first job I’ve ever had in the military where I was guaranteed to never go camping because the military forced me to.’ When you have only three major stops on post to in-process and one of them cannot be done until you are issued housing, the in-processing goes very fast. I went to base housing first to see about getting on post housing assigned. The lady at post housing told me it would take about two weeks to get assigned quarters. I thought, “Shit! That’s damn quick.” Then I asked her for a slip to show the people at guest housing so that I could extend my stay for myself and my family until housing was assigned. The lady informed me that the guest lodge had already been notified of my pending housing assignment and that my stay at the lodge had been extended. Then I went to post finance to settle my travel pay. That went pretty quickly because I had taken no advance pay, so everything went straight into my bank account after the travel pay was settled. Finally, I went to the household goods section to inform them of my tentative housing assignment date so that they could plan for the arrival of my household goods and hold baggage. When I had finished in-processing, I went back to JITC to report to Jack. He informed me that my direct supervisor was a Marine Lieutenant Colonel, and my senior rater was a Navy Captain. The only thing my direct supervisor had to say was, “Good to meet you, big guy.” Funny thing, that Marine Lieutenant Colonel always called me ‘big guy’. I was never really sure why, and I never asked him. When I met the Navy Captain, he made the mistake of saying, “Welcome aboard young man.” Of course, I couldn’t let that slide by without a comment, so I chimed back, “I don’t feel her rocking. Could it be that we’re in dry-dock? And I don’t remember climbing aboard a ship from a pier. Maybe this is just a funny looking ship.” That set him off. He gave me this big pitch about the Navy and how I missed my calling. I told him that I couldn’t be stuck at sea for six months where the only thing to do was fish. And my idea of fishing wasn’t to catch sharks. Then he said he had been in the Navy for like 1000 years, and he had never spent one night aboard a ship. And I said, “Sir, the recruiters don’t tell you shit like that.” After that ordeal, they told me where I would be working, and informed me that my office was in the ‘other’ building (affectionately known as the hanger), so I headed over to my office. I drove around to the parking lot where I had initially parked my wife’s car when I had first signed in. Then, I walked across the parking lot toward the gate guard shack. As I was approaching the gate guard shack, I saw the gate guard slowly walk around his desk inside the guard shack and run like hell out of the guard shack. I thought, ‘What in the hell?!? That is some really bizarre behavior. I wonder what lit a fire under his ass?’ Well, I found out soon enough. As soon as I approached him, the gate guard yelled at me that there was a rattlesnake in his guard shack. I asked, “Do you have a broom or a rake?” He looked at me as if I was crazy. “Are you insane,” he asked? “No. But I can use the broom or rake to coax Jake to exit the premises,” I replied. “Jake? Who in the hell is Jake,” he asked. I replied, “Jake the snake.” Get it, got it, good. Well, long story short, we had to wait for facilities to bring us a rake. But everybody was too afraid to go in and coax the rattlesnake out. I wasn’t. Snakes won’t bite, unless you don’t give them a way out. They realize that you are not dinner. It took me a while, but I finally managed to coax Jake to leave the guard shack, while giving him a wide corridor to exit the premises. Believe me, old Jake took his sweet old time about getting the heck out of Dodge. Quite an audience had gathered around while I coaxed the rattlesnake out of the building. I think that the snake had just come into the building to keep warm. Nobody was bitten and no critters were harmed in coaxing Jake out of the guard shack, and I encountered no exercises in futility in-process.
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