So this reminds me of a good story. One day back in 'Nam, we were patrolling near a reported munitions supply point. I was on point, and Skippy was following me navigating. He had the map and compass. We were skirting a rice paddy in the treeline, but needed to cross the paddy to continue. Skippy thought he knew a shortcut, so we backed into the trees and hunkered down for a few while we looked at it.
We brought the firing team leaders in to look at the map. Lenny, Scooter, and Jags peered down at the map with Skippy and me. The mosquitos were terrible, and I remember smearing bug juice all over the map by accident. Scooter sadly had the bowel runs for the last couple of days due to some bad water he drank, so he was already in a foul mood. And he lit into me for smearing the grease pencil on the map. Poor fella hadn't had a solid movement in days, and he was fit to be tied about it. And he took it out on me.
Needless to say, an argument broke out about where to go next. We were running out of water, Scooter needed to clean himself off, and we were quite a few clicks from the bivouac site. Lenny and Skippy wanted to take the shortcut. Jags and I wanted to continue as planned. And Scooter was just soiled, angry, and disagreeable with everything. And he made it impossible to come to a consensus, or even a majority. Nothing was good enough for him. He kept claiming that god wanted the squad to go a completely different way--across the paddy. We just figured he needed some water and some crackers. We thought he maybe was becoming delusional.
What's the point? None of us knew. We all just knew we were grumpy due to the heat, mosquitos, and the crappy water. All of these adverse conditions made all of us irritable, and we took it out on each other. For no reason. Some arguments made sense, and some made none whatsoever. But the argument just went on for what seemed like forever. We just needed to wrap up and move on so we could get to the bivouac site.
Kind of like this post....
