This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of cc&d magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.
Shake, Rattle, and What?
Pat Dixon
1
“Get in step, you ****ing knuckleheads! Baker! You give the cadence for your sorry-ass newly activated fellow officers. Sing it out like you got a pair!”
“Sir! Yes, sir! Okay, guys! Pick this up and stay in step!” shouted Second Lieutenant Ronald Baker over his shoulder. Then he began to sing in a loud, hoarse voice.
“Jody, Jody, don’t be blue!”
Fifty-eight other lieutenants, most with smirks on their sweaty young, sun-burned faces, repeated the line, some deliberately out of tune, out of time, or in falsetto voices: “Jody, Jody, don’t be blue!”
“Two more years an’ you’ll be through!” sang Baker.
“Two more years an’ I’ll be through!” sang the group.
“Tell me if I’m wrong!” he sang.
“You’re right!” they responded, stamping their right feet down hard in unison.
“Tell me I ain’t wrong!”
“You’re right!” Down stamped their right feet.
“Sound off!”
“One, two!”
“Sound off!”
“Three, four!”
“Bring-it-on-down!” sang Baker.
“One, two, three, four! One-two, three-four!” the group responded, swinging their arms with grins on their faces and feeling better about their thirty-pound packs and their M14 rifles than they had since formation nearly three hours before.
“You had a good home, but you left!” sang Baker.
“You’re right!” sang the group.
“Y’ could’a’ stayed home, but y’ left!”
“You’re right!”
“Sound off!”
“One, two!”
Fifteen minutes later, Captain Brian Zinman, a junior tactical instructor at Fort Benning’s Infantry Officers Basic Course, gave the command to halt for a ten-minute break.
“Sergeant Corelli!” he shouted.
“Sir!” shouted Staff Sergeant Corelli from twenty yards away, snapping to attention with precision.
“Make sure that none of these newie-lewies go into the bushes to take a leak! They can stand on the shoulder of the road an’ piss into the ditch, but no one steps off this road!”
“Yes, sir! Listen up, all you new off’cers! You heard what the cap’in jus’ said. No one leaves this ‘ere road—even if you got t’ take a crap! Any ‘tenant needs t’ do that can dig y’rself a little hole in the gravel at the side o’ this road an’ jus’ squat over it. An’ then bury what you do—so the Enemy don’ find it!”
“Hey! Johnson! Get your sorry ass right over here! Now!” shouted Captain Zinman at one of the lieutenants who was bending down.
“Double-time, Johnson!” he added, wiping his forehead and straightening his sunglasses.
Second Lieutenant Anne Johnson picked up her M14 from the gravel road, held it at high port, and ran to Captain Zinman. Two feet in front of him, she stood at attention, her rifle at her side and bewilderment on her face.
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
“Johnson, don’t you ever just lay your rifle on the ground when I’m around! If a piece of sand even gets in there, what could happen?”
“Sir! Stoppage, sir!” she replied, assuming a blank, pseudo-hypnotized facial expression.
“Damn’ right, lieutenant. An’ if you get a stoppage, what can be the result?”
“Sir, the enemy could kill me before I could kill him. Sir!”
“An’ what worse thing could happen?”
Lieutenant Johnson looked puzzled again.
“Sir. You could kill me. Sir?”
“Shee-it no, lieutenant! That would be a tender mercy! The enemy could kill five or ten of your buddies b’cause of your ****-up!”
“Sir. Yes, sir!”
“Give me twenty push-ups, right here, lieutenant!”
She carefully slung her weapon over her back with the sling crossing diagonally over her chest and obeyed him, counting loudly to twenty as she did.
“Good! Now don’t forget this or it will be fifty next time!”
“Sir. Yes, sir!”
“Dismissed, lieutenant!”
She ran back to where she had been and added her weapon to the teepee of stacked rifles that someone had prudently built during her absence.
“Sergeant Romero!” shouted the captain.
“Yes, es-sir!”
“Two minutes. Tell ‘Tenant Johnson that she’s going to take care of the cadence for the next three miles!”
2
During the next break, Second Lieutenant Sally Brochet walked up to Captain Zinman and said, “Sir. Permission to ask a question, sir.”
“Go ahead, Brochet.”
“Sir, why aren’t we permitted to go into the bushes to relieve ourselves, sir? This is especially hard on us female officers, sir, especially when we’re being watched—or might be watched—by your enlisted men, sir.”
“Brochet, have you ever heard what lurks in these woods, just off the road? Do you have any idea?”
“No, sir. Not exactly, sir. But I grew up near woods very much like these in Upper Michigan, sir, and I just cannot imagine there’s much danger, especially if two or three of us women went into the bushes together. Sir.”
“You can’t imagine? Let me tell you, Brochet, there’s danger in these woods—far greater than anything they’ve got up in your Michigan!”
He stared at her coldly over the top of his sunglasses.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
3
“Snakes! Big-ass cotton-mouths! Big-ass rattlers! Giant copperheads! Even little bitty coral snakes! Just a-waitin’ to bite your dumb asses—and other private parts! Venomous ****ing vipers! Hey! Cogswell! Wipe that ****ing smirk off your dumb sissy puss! Drop down an’ give me thirty! Now! Georgia is not a hospitable place for people who are inexperienced in the ways of deadly poisonous serpents! If you do not believe an experienced tac officer who has been down here in Georgia for the past eighteen months running little baby asses like yours through this component of your Officers Basic, then jus’ ask any enlisted man! You will have a chance to test yourself against the snakes the day after tomorrow when you have the Escape and Evasion component—where you all get to try an’ run an’ hide in the woods from the Enemy from twelve-hundred noon through the afternoon—and all through the whole moonless ****in’ night up till zero six hundred in the hay-hem! Some of you will not make it!”
Captain Zinman paused for effect and took a long drag on his cigarette, watching the young lieutenants coldly through his sunglasses.
“Some of you will get caught and tortured—psychologically and physically. Some of you will get lost in the woods and beg ‘em to come find you. An’ they will! An’ some of you will trip over logs or fall down ravines—or run y’r stupid heads into low-down branches, maybe put out one o’ y’r eyes! An’ the really unlucky ones’ll meet up with one or more o’ these deadly serpents! Jus’ two cycles ago, I had a couple o’ new little lewies, jus’ like y’rselves, who were escapin’ down a hillside in the dark, an’ they somehow found a whole nest o’ rattlers. Rigor had already set in by the time our dogs found ‘em. Nothin’ I could do but write a sorry ‘Dear Missus Jones’ letter to their mommas. ‘Billy an’ Sally died heroically in the service o’ God an’ Country!’ Shee-it! Folks usually hate gettin’ those kinds o’ letters ‘bout their kids!”
He took a final drag on his cigarette, flicked the ash onto the gravel road with his finger nail, and tucked the filter into the pocket of his starched and creased green denim fatigue pants. With the sole of one spit-shined combat boot, he ground the ash into the loose reddish gravel.
“Put ‘em out! Field strip ‘em! Don’t want the Enemy knowin’ how many of us went through here! Mullens! You take the cadence for the next twenty minutes. Fall in!”
4
Barely two hundred meters farther down the gravel road, Captain Zinman ordered Second Lieutenant Mullens to halt the group. With a litheness that seemed incompatible with his puffy facial features and his moderate beer belly, he darted into the woods yelling, “****ing Christ! He’s a big one!” Out of sight, Zinman’s voice carried back to the lieutenants and sergeants through the thick brush: “Jeez, he’s the biggest mother I’ve seen in the past five years! Oh—my—God!”
“Stan’ fast, young lewies!” ordered Sergeant Stang. “Cap’in say no one go in them woods till he tell ‘em to!”
The sound of underbrush being trampled and broken reached the road, but no more words were forthcoming. The lieutenants watched the thick green foliage that Captain Zinman had entered, sweated in the noonday Georgia sun, fingered the lids of their canteens, and said nothing. The sergeants alertly watched the lieutenants.
After three long minutes, a smiling Captain Zinman emerged from the brush some twenty feet to the left of where he had entered it. In his right hand he held aloft an eight-foot rattler by what might be called the back of its neck. The snake’s fifteen rattles vibrated loudly in the silent Georgia roadway as Zinman walked proudly towards the center of the silent lieutenants.
“Cogswell! Where the **** are you?” said Captain Zinman.
“Sir! Here, sir!” said a voice far to the right.
“Move y’r sorry little pink ass over here, on the double, sonny!”
First Lieutenant Barry Cogswell snapped to attention two feet in front of the captain. Captain Zinman looked at the lieutenant coldly for a full silent minute. Then he spoke loudly, for all to hear.
“Cogswell, you seemed to be a skeptic ‘bout snakes a little while ago. Prob’ly comes from you gettin’ y’rself a special two-year deferment to go to grad school b’fore you came on active duty.”
“Sir! No, sir!”
“Wrong answer, lieutenant. Don’t you ever contradict your superiors. Ever!”
“Sir! Yes, sir! I mean, no, sir! I won’t, sir!”
“This, lieutenant, is the kind o’ venomous viper you just might be unlucky enough to trip over during the Escape and Evasion exercise. Would you like to hold him for a couple minutes to get acquainted better with him, lieutenant?”
He lowered the snake to eye-level, and the lieutenant stepped backwards a foot.
“Sir! No, sir! No, I would not, sir!”
“No doubts at all in your military mind, lieutenant?”
“Sir! No doubts at all, sir! Not me, sir!”
“Good!” Captain Zinman turned to the group of rapt watchers. “Any of you spoiled, spoon-fed preppy scum a herpetologist here?” No one answered.
“Cogswell, what is a herpetologist?”
“Sir. I don’t know, sir!”
“You seem to be sweating a lot, Cogswell. Hot day?”
“Sir. Yes, sir. Very hot day, sir!”
“Leech! You seem to be a smart little lewie. What’s a herpetologist, an’ if you tell me it’s some one that studies your herpes, I’ll make you give me fifty.”
“Sir! I think, sir, it’s a scientist that studies snakes, sir!”
“Good job, Leech! I’m a herpetologist, people! My motto is ‘Know thy Enemy!’ Just one o’ your enemies out there is these here rattlers!” He paused. “My other motto is ‘Respect thy Enemy!’ My third motto is ‘Be merciful when you’re not at war!’ You kids just stan’ fast there while I put this fella back where I found him. Send him home to his missus an’ the kids. That way the woods’ll be properly stocked for such training as you ****ers’ll be getting—an’ all those that come after you!”
Zinman walked slowly into the brush, holding the noisy rattler aloft over his head. Two minutes later, he re-emerged and ordered Lieutenant Mullens to continue the march.
5
As Captain Zinman, four of his tactical training sergeants, and the fifty-nine new lieutenants—those who had survived thus far and were still well enough to march—disappeared down the reddish gravel road and their cadence song faded in the distance, the large rattler calmed down again and continued to digest the large chipmunk it had eaten an hour earlier.
Sergeants McNair and Scholl policed up the six beer bottles that they and Captain Zinman had emptied a short time ago and put them into the rear of their Jeep, next to the large wire-mesh cage containing the aging rattler named Spike.
Silently they cooperated in pulling a heavy tarp over the cage, and then McNair climbed into the driver’s seat.
“Good ****ing duty, huh, Scholl?”
“Bet yo’ white, cracker ass, Mackie-boy! Better’n doin’ time over in the Gulf!”
“An’ much better’n takin’ a fifteen-mile hike in Georgia in July!”
