DOG DAY AFTERNOON
The saga began three
days ago when the senior Non-Commisioned Officer, Cpl Mickley,
awakened to find that one of his boots had vanished into thin air.
Immediately suspicious of the rest of the team, and rightfully so,
he began questioning each member regarding the possible shenanigans
being played at his expense. After somewhat calming his initial
suspicions he began contemplating the alternative possibility.
Yes...the possibility that wild dogs had stolen his boot in the
middle of the night.
We had seen these four-legged pests lurking at
the top of our berm one morning as we were forming up for a debrief.
There was no time to investigate at the time, as we had a convoy in
an hour. Luckily, my Cpl had thought to bring an extra pair of boots
along for this task force, and he annoyingly dug them out of his
pack, still with a suspicious eye cast on the other members of our
security team. As the day went on without anyone coming forward to
claim responsibility for the missing footwear, the event became an
increasingly humorous catalyst for canine/footwear jokes. There was
just no end to the sarcasm and my Cpl became increasingly confident
that his boot had “gone to the dogs.” See how easy it is??
Yesterday evening, just
before chow, during a round of boot jokes, we convinced Cpl Mickley
to climb to the top of the berm and look out over the desert to see
if it might be down there somewhere. As we cracked jokes about the
Taliban training dogs to steal boots merely to get unintelligent
Marines to climb the berm into the open, Mickley proclaimed from the
other side, “I found it!” Just like that, the three day mystery
had come to a dramatic conclusion. Further investigation revealed
that the dog more than likely realized he was not going to be able to
get the boot back through the concertina wire he had successfully
traversed on his way into the compound, and had dropped it there.
However, Mickley has yet to reunite his foot with the boot, as upon
finding it, he threw it back over the berm and it landed in a stream
of drainage water from the hygiene area.
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