BTW... you had a very lucky duck!Esimison. If I didn't live, my stories would not have been as funny. But remember, in Nam we had no electricity, no plumbing, no clean water, no roof, no walls, no roads, no underwear, (no Seriously) no nothing but mud and VC. We did have mosquitoes, leaches, scorpions, all sorts of snakes (I once shot a cobra and a very huge python) Tigers, elephants, monkeys and malaria. I spent a year in the jungle and I never came out except for a week of R&R in Australia.
My unit lost men every week and in one night we lost about 50 of us out of about 250. (They wrote a book about it. It was the worst day of my life.
http://www.thehistoryreader.com/contemporary-history/april-1-1970-fire-base-illingworth-hell-earth/ )
I once caught a scorpion that was about 7" long. I put him in a can about as big as a beer can and his elbows stuck out. I shot it with my 45 and that just wounded it and made him mad. I eventually killed him with my M-16 but he didn't go easily. If that didn't work, I had plenty of grenades.
Speaking about snow. I was stationed in Colorado for a few months and one of the things I remembered was the snow plows on the trains. They were like 15' high and I thought that was a little overkill. The truth is that those plows were not high enough.
I went out in an M 60 tank through that snow and you can't stop an M 60 tank but the snow was coming up over the turret. There is a tank story that goes with that but not tonight as I think I already told it and this is a tank move thread, not an M 60 military tank thread.
This was Duk Duk. He was my best friend. I took him from a kid who was going to make lunch out of him. I gave the kid some C Rations which were just as greasy. Duk Duk stayed with me about 8 or 9 months and would not leave me. He slept with his head on my shoulder and all night he would "snore" He would say, very quietly Quack, Quack, Quack. Then when the sun came up about 4:30 he would go Quack Quack very loud in my ear until I fed him. When he came in a helicopter with me I had to hold his wings down. If I walked away, he would run after me qand sit down in front of me. I really miss Duk Duk.
This was our "Amazon" Anything we needed came on one of these.
This is Judy (the monkey) looking for something to eat in my pocket.
This was a friend of mine that wandered out of the bush