The Strange

Once of things things you discover during basic training is that people often behave in unusual ways when they are stressed. There are lots of examples, but I'm going to focus on two that were particularly strange (and they each require a bit of background).

The first one involves a recruit whose name I've forgotten, so I'll refer to him as airman Freak.

Aside: "Freak" was a term many people with long hair used to describe themselves during the late 60s. Freaks differed from hippies in that hippies were kids who were rebelling against their well-to-do parents by pretending to be poor, whereas freaks really were poor... Yeah - I considered myself to be a freak. But I digress:-)

Airman Freak was one of the guys from Oregon I'd flown down to San Antonio with and I don't think he said a single word the entire trip. He just stared at everything (and everyone) as if he were both confused and amazed at the same time...  A couple of days into basic someone finally asked him why he always looked so puzzled and he said he had been on hallucinogens for most of the past 3 years (the military didn't test for that) and being "straight" was kind of freaking him out :-)
He ended up bunking across the aisle from me in the dorm and over time he opened up a bit. When we were finally allowed to receive mail he got some highly entertaining letters from all the members of the commune he'd lived on near Eugene before enlisting... As I recall he was going to be an Air Force "historian" (yes, that's a real career field) - apparently he had a degree that qualified him for that... He was an interesting guy :-)

But that's not the story. This is the story:
At some point during basic a guy named Airman Barnes (who bunked to my left) began spending all his "down time" lying under his bed growling, and when anyone got too close he'd grab their ankle and try to bite it... So, one day a few of us were seriously debating whether Barnes was truly disturbed or just being weird, and airman Freak (who had hardly said anything to anyone up to that point) overheard the conversation and said "If you see him out on the window ledge with a dead pigeon in his mouth, that's the time to start worrying"... I don't know if it was the image of Barnes squatting on the ledge drooling all over a dead bird, or if it was the fact that the "silent one" had unexpectedly spoken, or if it had just been so long since anything struck us as funny, but that remark had us all pretty much rolling on the floor :-) ... BTW: Although Airman Barnes was a bit strange around the edges he made it through basic just fine.

Another aside: I couldn't mention this earlier without giving away the punch line, but  Lackland was so overrun with pigeons at that time that the droppings were damaging the buildings so the Air Force had started poisoning them (hence the dead ones all over the window ledges). The sad part was that you can't selectively poison a single species so there were sick and dying birds of every kind around us the whole time we were in basic. (I'm certain that even in 1973 Federal laws were being violated.) Yeah - it added sort of a "Hitchcock" dimension to what was already a pretty surreal experience.

And on to the second story:

The airman who bunked to my right was nicknamed "Touche" (pronounced too-shay) after "Touche Turtle" (a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character from the early 1960's), and if you saw him you'd know exactly why :-)
BTW - Touche had made an epic blunder: During a "TI party" (a bunch of drill sergeants burst into the dorm in the middle of the night and started throwing our stuff everywhere and terrorizing us) he had revealed that he joined the Air Force because a judge had given him a choice of enlisting or going to jail after he punched the New York state trooper who responded to his drunk driving accident... Now - Touche couldn't have weighed more than 115 lbs and the thought of him punching a cop was almost laughable (I suspect it didn't really hurt), but the TIs were not amused at all :-)  Yeah - Touche had it pretty rough from then on but still made it through... I mean, seriously - when a drill sergeant asks you why you enlisted how hard is it to say "Because I love my country, sir"?

Another aside: One of my favorite moments from that "TI party" was when one of the sergeants walked up to a random bed post, yanked off the metal cap and pulled out a rolled up Playboy centerfold (obviously planted there).... You should have seen the look on the airman's face. I never could figure out why he (in particular) was targeted for the prank, but the interrogation that followed ("Yes, sir", "No, sir", "I don't know, sir") was pretty darn hilarious... BTW: The TIs asked me some things we were supposed to have memorized and I knew them cold so they moved on... But back to the story:

The other character involved was airman "Beau" (once again, I don't remember his real name) who bunked on the other side of Touche... He was a "good-ole-boy" from a small town in Arkansas, and despite being a total redneck he was a really likable the guy... After a couple of weeks of basic he'd say things like "Y'all are my buddies now and after we all get out if you're ever in my town y'all need to stop by and see me... When you git there just ask anyone where Beau lives and they'll tell ya, cause everybody knows Beau!"... Now - Beau wasn't exactly what you'd call a "big guy", but he was pretty buff - definitely not somebody you'd want to mess with...

And now - the "main event":
One evening Beau was on his way back to his locker after taking a shower when Touche stepped in front of him and asked to see one of his flip-flops (we weren't allowed to go barefoot in the dorm)... Beau was highly suspicious and asked Touche what he wanted it for and Touche said something like "I'm not going to do anything with it. I just really need to see it. Trust me!". And after a bit of back and forth Beau finally took off one of his flip-flops and handed it to Touche.

Touche proceeded to examine the flip-flop for a few seconds (turning it over repeatedly), then he whacked Beau square on the forehead with it as hard as he could and took off the opposite direction...

It took Beau a moment to process what had happened before he went after Touche, and I remember thinking that Touche was in deep shit. (Like I said, Beau was seriously ripped and Touche was a tiny little guy)... Touche was still a few steps ahead of Beau when he got to the end of the aisle, and I was wondering how the heck he was going to make the left turn into the other room at the speed he was going - but he didn't even try. He ran full tilt into the cinder block wall at the end of the dorm. (I don't even know how to describe how hard he hit it)... I was afraid that Beau was still going to beat the snot out of Touche but he was laughing way too hard to do anything...

After Touche recovered from knocking himself stupid (it took a couple of minutes) he apologized to Beau (who had a big red welt on his forehead), but could offer no explanation for why he did it. (I honestly don't think he knew)... There was never a problem between Beau and Touche after that, and Touche never did anything else even remotely" odd" again... It remains one of the most bizarre and inexplicable things I have ever seen a human being do :-)