Showing posts with label rotc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rotc. Show all posts

Saturday, October 08, 2011

Monster in the Mist

September saw temperatures reach a hundred degrees here in central Oklahoma but when October arrived, it was if someone had pulled a temperature switch. We have already experienced fifties and even forties, and day after day of drizzly weather. Today was no different.

After work, as I set out on my walk, a misty haze cloaked south Edmond. Walking is good exercise and great stress relief. It must also increase the blood flow to the brain because I always seem to solve my toughest dilemmas, or remember something from my veiled past whenever I walk. Tonight, I remembered something that had occurred many years ago. How I forgot this incident, I will never know because it was one of the most singularly frightening moments of my life.

I was a freshman in college at what is now the University of Louisiana at Monroe. My brother Jack had started there the prior year and convinced me to join an ROTC precision drill team called the Fusileers. I did, enjoying the camaraderie immensely. Toward the end of the first semester, we underwent an initiation called Hell Week.

During Hell Week, we initiates had to go to class everyday in full dress uniform, and then hang around the student union in case a senior Fusileer wanted to make us do push-ups, or recite the memorized, rhyming answer to specific military questions. I can’t remember a single rhyme, but I knew them all by heart during Hell Week.

Hell Week culminated with Hell Night. There is a giant, mostly abandoned gravel quarry on the outskirts of Monroe. During Hell Night, the initiated Fusileers dropped off us uninitiated in the darkness to try to find our way to the entrance. Along the way, the upperclassmen would ambush us with firecrackers, cherry bombs and M-80’s - legal fireworks at the time. The night was dark and hazy and we had no flashlights. During a particularly frenetic ambush, I somehow got separated from the group.

I must have walked a mile without calling out because I didn’t want the upperclassmen to capture me – having heard about the dire consequences the entire week. I soon realized that I was lost and began calling out.

The gravel pit was like the surface of Mars, rugged, rolling and completely barren of vegetation. Hazy rain had soaked my fatigues, my socks and boots wet from running through pooled water. When I stopped to listen for the other Fusileers, I heard something quite different and unexpected. It was the whumph of some large animal, coughing to get the attention of anyone near it. I didn’t know what it was, but it scared me. Not having a good grasp of what direction I was moving toward, I started away from the sound.

There was no moon or stars, only darkness and a persistent mist rising up from the broken gravel beneath my feet. I called out, “help.”

No one answered.

I heard the whumph again and realized it was not my imagination. My heart began racing as I also realized that the sound was drawing ever closer. I tried moving faster which resulted in a face-first plunge into a cold pool of water. Another chill ran up my spine as I heard a low growl on the hill directly behind me. Unable to get away, I lifted myself into a sitting position and turned to face whatever was stalking me.

On the rocky hill above me, I could just make out the moving shadow of some dark, four-legged beast. With my heart racing wildly, I prepared for its attack, something that never occurred. Over the hill behind me appeared the old World War II Jeep the head Fusileers used to move about the rock quarry. I could see its lights coming up from behind. When it topped the hill, the lights flashed briefly on the beast at the top of the hill.

All I ever saw was the red demon eyes of some misty apparition. Lights from the Jeep blinded me when I turned around, the beast gone when I glanced away into the darkness.

“Wilder, where the hell have you been?”

“Lost, Sir,” I said.

Major Pfrimmer glanced at his watch. “Damn good thing for you it’s after midnight or I would have had to wash you out. You may be a sorry sack of shit, but you’re a Fusileer now, so get in the damn Jeep."

I crawled into the open vehicle, regaling in the smiles, handshakes and shoulder slaps from my fellow initiates that had also survived Hell Night. Someone passed around a bottle of cheap whiskey and I imbibed, forgetting about the monster of the mist with glowing red eyes until forty years had passed, during my walk through a hazy Edmond neighborhood.

Eric'sWeb

Sunday, March 06, 2011

Marching in the Venus Parade

As a freshman in college during the 60s, I joined a precision marching group called the Fusileers. The college I attended required two years of ROTC and the national paranoia concerning Vietnam hadn’t yet set in. Besides, we got to do some neat things like taking trips to Mardi Gras and march in parades.
In 1965 I went with the Fusileers to New Orleans to march in the Iris and the Venus Parades. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Venus is one of the older Krewes, or carnival clubs. We arrived at Jackson Barracks, an old army post on the Mississippi River named after Andy Jackson, in an old bus we called the Golden Goose. The night before the parade most of us left the barracks on foot in groups of five or six and made our way toward Bourbon Street. My group stopped at a neighborhood bar, drank Regal Beer for twelve cents a glass and sampled the gumbo. We made it to Bourbon Street around dark.
I bought a fifth of Early Times at a drug store a block or so from Bourbon Street. Most of us got separated in the throngs of people crowding the French Quarter. John T, the last member of the Fusileers that I’d arrived with to the Quarter disappeared down Conti, towing a college girl he’d just met. It didn’t matter because I wasn’t alone.
Comforted by the gentle caress of Early Times, I followed the drunken mass of humanity pressing against me to the entrance of Pat O’Brien’s Irish Bar, the crowd funneling into the courtyard informing me that I’d found the place to be. When I finally made it into the enchanted courtyard I realized my instincts had been correct. The courtyard was a compilation of flowing fountains, Spanish tile, potted plants and lingering mystery. I soon found my own college girl in the mass of humanity packed into the magical place. Or I should say she found me.
“Can you help me?” she said, grasping my hand a bit too tightly.
“If I can,” I said.
Blond hair draped her shoulders laid bare by her orange, University of Tennessee sleeveless tee shirt. She was looking me straight in the eyes as she squeezed my hand, so close I felt as if she were reading my mind.
“Can you go into the men’s bathroom and see if my boyfriend is there?”
“How will I know, even if he is?” I asked.
“Call his name, Tom. Tell him Susie is looking for him,” she said.
The mob in the men’s bathroom didn’t respond when I shouted out Tom’s name nor did anyone even give me a glance when I told them Susie was looking for him. I didn’t even feel like an idiot because everyone else seemed far more screwed up than I was. Susie grabbed my arm, pulling me close when I walked out the door.
“Well?” she said.
“He’s not in there,” I said.
“You sure? Maybe passed out in a stall?”
“No,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t let go of my arm.
She didn’t, drawing even closer, one arm around my waist, her dark eyes darting around the people in the courtyard.
“Can I stay with you?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Then let’s go into the bar. I’ll buy you a Hurricane.”
She pulled me into Pat O’Brien’s where dueling pianos were serenading loud and boisterous patrons from some university or the other. The tables were full, standing room only as she ordered drinks at the bar.
“What is it?” I asked when she handed me the icy glass filled with a syrupy concoction.
“Hurricane,” she said. “The signature drink of New Orleans. Don’t drink it too fast or you’ll be sorry.”
“Wow!” I said, sipping the alcoholic nectar through two red straws that I couldn’t from my lips seem to unlock. “I wonder what happened to your boyfriend?”
“He’s a chicken shit,” she said. “A man was following us. Someone in the crowd told us he was a professional boxer.”
“What did he want?” I asked.
“Me,” she said. “Tom got scared and deserted me. When we finish our Hurricanes will you take me back to my room?”
“Sure,” I said.
“You can keep the glass. It’s a souvenir. Why don’t we just go ahead and leave? We can finish our Hurricanes on the way to the hotel.
She began pulling me through the crowd toward the exit. She let go of my arm when we reached it, recoiling when she saw a short, prematurely bald man glaring at us. Before I knew what had hit me, the man smacked me on the bridge of the nose with a round-house right that snapped my head back. The unexpected punch sent my glasses flying across the crowded bar and the Hurricane glass crashing to the tile floor.
As a freshman in college, I was around six feet tall and weighed about one hundred thirty pounds. I must have looked meaner than I really was because the man who had sucker-punched me had hurried away, melting into the Mardi Gras masses outside on the street. Susie, my new Tennessee girlfriend, quickly clutched my arm as someone from the crowd retrieved my glasses and handed them to me.
“Let’s hurry,” Susie said. “My hotel isn’t far away. We’ll catch a cab.”
When a cab pulled to the curb in the darkened outskirts of Mardi Gras mania, I held the door for her as she entered.
“I can’t go with you,” I said. “I’m a soldier. I have a twelve-o’clock curfew and need to get back to the barracks.”
Her dark frown and tightly crossed arms were like a slap in the face as the door shut and the taxi hurried away into the night.
Though I truly don’t remember how, I made it back to Jackson Barracks, albeit without my Hurricane glass, before the witching hour. Cut nose, broken glasses and the recent memory of Susie’s warm breasts pressing against my arm were my only souvenirs.  I stayed up the rest of the night reading the Terry Southern erotic classic Candy, thinking of Susie and what might have been.
Mardi Gras that year was my first taste of crazy and surreal Carnival. I’d lapped it up, maybe because I had viewed it through tired, near-sighted, hung-over eyes. Even though my feet hurt like hell the next day, after the seven-mile parade that lasted six hours or so, I would gladly have done it again. With another seven-mile parade on tap for the next day, I never made it back to Bourbon Street, or to Pat O’Brien’s.
Soon after the trip, things got worse in Southeast Asia. John T dropped out of school, was drafted, sent to Vietnam and dead within the year; one of the war’s many victims. I didn’t sign up for the third year of ROTC and quickly forgot my childhood dreams of becoming a soldier. I had my face rubbed in my childhood dreams when I was drafted shortly after graduation and quickly learned the truth about the old saying, “don’t wish too hard for anything. It might just come true.”
###
P.S. - Though I didn't attend my first Mardi Gras until I was seventeen, I'd already visited New Orleans many times. My brother Jack and I spent time there with our Aunt Carmol, a schoolteacher. My first wife Gail grew up in Chalmette, a suburb of the city. Though my first French Quarter Mystery, Big Easy wasn't published until 2006, I knew I was destined to write a series that would include the dirt, trash, innuendos, and accusations about people, places, and events I'd gleaned through years of listening to the people around me. Hope you'll give them a read and see for yourself. Eric



Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He is the author of the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans and the Paranormal Cowboy Series. Please check it out on his AmazonBarnes & Noble, and iBook author pages. You might also like to check out his website.