So, okay, now the story. It's a little long, but stick with it, as it's actually the single defining day of my life.
Here's the checklist again, if you want to follow along:
A. A chain-wielding man in overalls was my salvation
B. A chain-wielding man in overalls was my undoing
C. A man shouted, "OK," then slapped me
D. I asked a woman to marry me
E. I bloodied the legs of a woman
F. I flagged down a ride in a forest
G. I ironically sang a Disney tune
H. I missed the arrival of a woman from the Caribbean
I. I saw my best friend, dazed, on a sand dune, at midnight
J. I screamed "The F-Word" repeatedly toward the heavens
K. I used the phrase, "I'll be right back…"
L. I vomited in another man's hat
M. I waited patiently for the effect of gravity to be counteracted
N. I walked a mile for a Camel
O. I was draped in nylon
P. I was hung from a tree
Q. I was lied to concerning an abbreviation
R. I was loaded into the back of a truck with thirty other men
S. I was ordered to put down my weapon
T. I was put on a plane against my will
U. I was swarmed by thousands of ladybugs
V. I was used to fill a quota
W. I watched, helplessly, as a trusted companion sank into the water
X. My traveling companion nearly fainted from the heat
Y. Several hundreds of dollars worth of damage was done to my car
Z. Someone stole my pot
So.
Allow me to preface the explanatory tale with the head-slapping revelation that "Exnihil" was - a decade ago - actually "Sgt. Nihil," Special Ops Paratrooper.
While in an intensive six-month military language course (I was studying French to train soldiers in Africa), I met a beautiful young female Reservist who was also studying French (her area of operations was the Caribbean). I began as her tutor, but, by the end of the course, had fallen in love.
After graduation, I returned to my company at Ft. Bragg, while she was deployed on a language immersion exercise to Martinique. She was gone for two months, during which time my feelings for her only grew. At the conclusion of her exercise she would be returning to Ft. Bragg for out-processing, and she called me long distance to ask whether I would want to meet her at the Raleigh airport. I told her that nothing could keep me away.
And that’s where my surreal 24-hours began.
*******
The day of her arrival, I told my Platoon leader that I needed to leave the office a little bit early that day to get up to Raleigh.
"Um, Sgt Nihil, you’re not going to Raleigh tonight, there’s a jump you’ve got to be on."
A little background info for the non-airborne types out there: when you’re airborne, you receive a certain incentive pay for that status. In order to maintain that status, however, you need to stay "current" by actually, you know… jumping every so often.
"I don’t need to jump, though," I said, "I’m current."
"Doesn’t matter. The Air Force has to fill the seats for their own qualification.
(V) Like it or not, you’re getting on that plane".
(T)*******
Flash forward a couple of hours. It’s about 7’oclock in the evening. I’m fully geared up for a "tactical combat" jump (basically meaning a full rucksack and a rifle have been strapped to my legs – above and beyond the parachute on my back and the reserve chute on my belly). In my own mind, I can still make this jump, grab a real quick shower, and still make it to the airport in time to meet my beloved. That illusion would soon be dispelled.
As I waddled into the back of the plane, wedged in between a hundred or so other guys, the word trickled down the line: we weren’t getting out of this plane anytime soon. The Air Force had their own mission to run that night, to qualify themselves. They had to fly 3 hours in a mode called "Nap of the Earth," flying as close as they could to the ground, contouring the terrain. We wouldn’t be jumping until they were finished.
"Why is it called 'Nap'?" I shouted to a guy next to me
"Abbreviation – Near As Possible"
"That doesn’t make sense, 'Near as possible
of the Earth?' Shouldn’t that be 'to the Earth'?"
"I don’t know!" he shouted, "It just is!" I found out much later (a couple of days ago actually) that he was completely lying.
(Q)*******
Hour 2 of this flight.
Up and down and up and down and up and… oh my God, no!
"You OK, Nihil?"
"Dude, he looks green."
"Get him a bag!!!"
"I don’t have a bag!"
"Crap! Use this!" The fellow across from me handed me his extra patrol cap. As I leaned forward and released my lunch, I looked up at this guy and finally understoond the real meaning of an "army buddy".
(L)******
Hour 4. The AF has completed their requirement long ago, but there is some sort of difficulty getting our drop zone lined up for the jump. I look at my watch. She landed about a half hour ago.
(H) She’s going kill me. But no time to dwell, because, thank God! The signal. We’re clear to jump!
"Outboard Personnel Stand UP!" the Jumpmaster’s commands bellow down the plane.
"Inboard Personnel Stand UP!"
"Hook UP!"
"Check Static LINES!"
"Check EquipMENT!"
"OK… OK… OK… OK…" The chain of equipment check OK’s flows down the line, each soldier checking the fellow in front of him and slapping their side in confirmation.
(C)"All OK JumpmasTER!"
Green Light! "GO! GO! GO! GO!"
My body exits into the night sky as I begin the patient countdown for my chute deployment.
(M) 1…thousand…2…thousand…3…thousand…4… what’s happening? It’s supposed to jerk me back! "Four!" I yell. "FOUR! FOUR! FO… ugh!"
(J) My chute deploys.
******
I look down below, through my feet, and through the darkness. Perspective during night jumps is always off, but this seems
very wrong.
That looks nothing like the sand of the drop zone below me. In fact that looks like tr… OH… MY… GOD! They completely missed the drop zone and put us out over a freaking forest. I fix my eyes on the horizon and brace myself for a tree landing, hoping, praying, I get out of this without any broken bones.
Crash! My feet bust through the top of the pines. "Ohh! Ahh! Crap! Ugh!" Somehow, my body winds through the tree, getting battered but, thankfully, not broken. My descent is suddenly… almost gently… stopped. The top of my chute has settled across the tree and hung me just about ten feet from the ground.
(P) Small miracles.
******
Following protocol for a tree landing, I popped one of my shoulder straps and swung into the now deflated parachute. The nylon canopy wrapped around me
(O), as I did my best to climb down.
I hit the ground and began to try to free the chute from the tree. "Forget it, Nihil". I turned and who did I see walking through the forest, but my Platoon Sgt. with like three other soldiers. "Just leave it. They dropped us all over the woods. We need to get as many people as possible back to the rally point and then come back for the chutes."
And so the trek began, trudging laboriously through the woods, picking up all of our scattered comrades on the way. When we finally hit the drop zone, I heard a familiar voice ahead, saying, "Gotta go… I gotta go… gotta… go…" It was my best buddy who, in his own landing, got his helmet knocked off and was wandering around the sand dunes with a concussion
(I). We picked him up, and continued on.
********
When we all reached the rally point, we were told, “OK, men, drop your rucks. Drop your weapons
(S), drop your helmets. We’re heading back for the chutes. We each made a small pile of equipment, and got online for what would be a three hour exercise in military competency as we tried, with varying degrees of success, to remove 100 sheets of nylon from the top of a pine forest until 3AM.
When it seemed as though no further progress could be made, we were ordered back again to the rally point where I gathered up my ruck… my weapon… and my… my… where was my helmet?
"Has anybody seen an extra pot?" Kevlar ballistic helmets were colloquially known as K-pots, or just pots. "Hey anybody… helmet?"
"Jesus, Nihil, you lost your freaking helmet?"
"I didn’t lose it! I left it right there. Somebody stole it!"
(Z) Believe it or not, this was common practice, as you could get a hundred dollars at on off post pawn shop for a "found" helmet.
"We’re not looking for it now! Just get on the truck! We’re getting out off here!" I squeezed myself into the back of the "deuce and a half" with 30 other guys
(R) and set off for home, thinking only of the young lass who had long stopped waiting for me.
******
Well, thankfully, the girl had a bit more sense than to wait idly. She waited about a half hour, then called my company, who gave her the low-down. She… in her infinite wisdom… got a ride to my barracks, and was waiting for me when I wandered in, utterly deflated, at 5AM.
We’ll now draw the curtain until about 9 that morning when, believe it or not, Sgt. Nihil was back in the office (there’s no 'day off' in Special Ops) where my Platoon Sgt was telling me that before they could issue me another helmet that I had to go back to the drop zone and ensure that it wasn’t lost.
Now I
knew it wasn’t there, but I also knew that he was basically giving me the opportunity to take a day long ride out to the countryside. I called my female friend, who had nothing to do for a couple of days and she said, absolutely, she would accompany me.
We drove out together, about an hour and a half, to the drop zone, which, if you recall, I had mentioned was
sand. Now, at the time, Sgt. Nihil drove a ’91 Ford Escort – not the best all terrain vehicle. I realized, in very short order, that driving across this sandpit looking for a $100 piece of plastic that I knew didn’t exist was a fools errand. "OK," I said to my lady-friend, "One more quick pass, then we’re out of here. Hmmm… I suppose we could try behind that tree line…"
I drove across to a wooded rise and, making a slight turn saw… nothing. I had, in making that turn come face to face with the bank of a stream. I quickly threw the Escort into reverse, but… too late. The weight of the car crushed the stream bank and my little sedan went, face-first, into the drink.
"Crap! Crap! Get out of the car," I shouted to my girl. We scrambled up the bank, as I watched my very first car, a trusted companion for 6 years slowly sinking into the mud and water
(W).
"Oh, my god! This is bad. We’ve got to try to get some sort of traction underneath the back tires." I slogged back down to the sinking car and popped the trunk, pausing to brush off a couple ladybugs that landed on my arm.
******
Bzzz. I pulled whatever I though I might be able to wedge under my rear tires, and began stuffing it back there. Bzzz. Freaking bugs. Ugh, get off. Ten bugs… twenty… fifty. What the hell? In just the couple of minutes I was down there, there were probably 100 ladybugs on me. I looked up and saw my girlfriend swatting around herself. I looked back at the car, BZZZZ, hundreds of bugs.
"Ahhh!" My girl screamed. I looked up to her freaking out as she was frantically brushing bugs off of herself. I can not
begin to do justice to this, but trust me, this was out of a horror film. I guess we must have happened on a swarm of breeding ladybugs, because, within minutes, there was barely a surface not covered.
(U) I climbed back up the bank and, along with my girlfriend, started running away, literally scraping ladybugs off each other. One is cute. Thousands are a nightmare.
*******
So the trek began… again.
This time it was me and my girlfriend, alone, in a forest. We though the best course of action was to make it to a road and flag down a ride to a payphone, where we could get a tow truck to haul us out. Unfortunately, we were
miles from a road, and this patch of forest was really dense. I looked down at one point at my poor love who, in her wisdom, chose to wear shorts today. Her legs, from the knees down were covered in scratches and cuts.
(E) To her credit she was a tough cookie, telling me, "Eh, don’t worry, you know… 'Born and raised in the briar patch.'"
"Ha!" I laughed nigh-maniacally, "Song of the South? Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, Zip-A-Dee-Ay, My, oh my, what a wonderful day!
(G)" She looked at me, perhaps with a mix of pity and fear, but it was short lived because, up ahead, I heard the sound of a truck.
I started running straight ahead, tearing through the underbrush, jumping logs, and saw the light of an opening, a dirt road. I surged forward, busting through the woodline and into the road. A pick-up truck was heading right toward me. Like an escaped lunatic I started waving frantically.
(F) The truck stopped, and out of the driver’s seat climbed what looked to be an extra from "Deliverance."
"Hey, there," said the over-all wearing driver in a southern drawl, "What are y’all doin’ out here?"
******
Well, thankfully, human nature is a bit more sane than Hollywood would have you believe because, as my girl exited the woods an I told this man my predicament, he said, in a super-friendly manner, "Shoot, well, I got a chain in back. You hop in and I’ll tow y’all out."
(A)And tow me out he did. He drove us back to the drop zone stream, and fighting through the sheets of ladybugs, made his way to the underside of my Escort and pulled it back to the horizontal. He drove in front of us all the way back to the road and made sure we didn’t get stuck again. Upon reaching the road, he gave a wave and was off. We were back in business… for a time.
******
So…
We’re driving down this dirt road, heading to the point where we will hook back up with the main road and civilization when I turn to my friend and say, "Do you… smell something?"
"Yeah… like a burning?"
I look in my side mirror and see smoke. "What the hell?" I pull off to the side of the road, jump out and see that my rear tire is now at a 45 degree angle to my car… and smoking. It turns out that well the helpful fellow had attached the chain, he had not hooked the frame of the car, but the Tie-rod, and had snapped it.
(B) This would later cost me a few hundred dollars to get the car back to normal.
(Y)"Oh, my god!" I looked in on my girlfriend, who was just shaking her head. "OK, this time, I just need you to stay with the car. I know that the main road is no more than a mile ahead. You stay here… I’ll be right back…"
(K) I don’t know why this was important to me to be alone now, but I suspect, at a primal level, I knew that I was about to explode and without a cigarette I might kill someone. I really didn’t want it to be her.
******
Well, I did make it the next mile to the main road, to a convenient store, to a payphone, and to a pack of Camel Lights
(N). I called the tow truck, and slowly, defeatedly, made my way back to the car, smoking furiously the whole time.
Upon reaching the car, I collapsed into the driver’s seat, and, not even looking at her, just left out a defeated sigh. The next thing I felt was a hand on my shoulder and the next thing I heard was her voice:
"C’mon… It’s not
that bad."
A strange stillness settled over me.
In the past 24 hours I had been bruised, battered, cut, abused, robbed, hung, dehydrated, sleep-deprivated, infested, and hurled out of a moving plane. I was as low as I could go… utterly physically, mentally, emotionally exhausted, I was filthy, sweaty, smelly, and as far as I could tell, was about to be financially broke. This was as bad as it could get, and she was telling me it wasn’t
that bad.
Then I knew.
It was her. She was the one.
I looked at my beloved and said, with tears in my eyes, "Will you marry me?"
(D) The future Mrs. Nihil said "Yes."
******
Question passes to Rockhopper Lad.
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