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Frequent Drizzle

Frequent Storm was an exercise designed to test our higher HQs ability to fight a guerrilla war far, far away. Since
we knew this was about them not us, the teams involved renamed it Frequent Drizzle and didn’t expect to do much
ass-busting work. That’s what we thought when we left for Ie Shima to do our mission prep isolation. We didn’t count
on Ralph Rodd. He was a warrant officer who had been in Vietnam, that’s what we knew when he got to Oki. He
showed up at the team room and shuffled in looking very unassuming. If you met him you would have bet he was an
accountant not a barrel-chested freedom fighter, very Clark Kent. As we talked to some of the crustier, old guys
while drinking at the “Gay Men’s Bar", we learned that Ralph had been a recon team leader in Vietnam and was
considered one of the baddest dudes they knew. “Ralph Rodd? The little bald guy with glasses?” We would ask.
“Oh yeah”, was the response “A lot of people wouldn’t even talk to him when he was back in camp.” We were
skeptical but these were all the baddest guys we knew of sayin’ this. We would learn. We got to Ie Shima and
started to set up our isolation area. Ie Shima is famous for only one thing, it’s where the GI’s best friend, Ernie Pyle
was killed near the end of WWII. Other than that….nothing. We set up there because it was an island about 15 miles
from Okinawa and we would stage from there to re-invade Okinawa’s nastiest bit the northern tip.

The game, for Frequent Storm, was this. The island nation of, whatever name some jagoff major in DC gave it, was
bad. At this time that meant communist but for whatever reason we were going to make a “regime change”. Our role
in this is known as guerrilla warfare. We sneak in and link up with locals who don’t like the Jagoffian government. We
train and equip them and then help these intrepid freedom fighters “Enact a regime change.” It should surprise no
one that our government has been practicing this. My favorite image is the Van Hagar video for “Right Now” they
have subtitles through the whole thing and at one point it shows animated stick figures. Two are talking and a third
is kneeling behind the victim. One shove and the victim takes a fall while the text reads, “Right now our government
is doing things we think only other governments do”. Hmm. We are aren’t we? Anywho.

Whatever intentions we may have had for lollygagging our way through this exercise, Chief Rodd was going to train,
and his ally was the team sergeant Butch . That was too much for the rest of us too overcome, so we resigned
ourselves to actually busting our asses. We didn’t know just what we had just bought into. We had almost a full week
for isolation, way too long. That gave Chief Rodd plenty of time to show us how much fun patrolling in the jungle can
be. Now all of us had patrolled in the jungle before, we just hadn’t done it anywhere near as slowly as we soon
learned we needed too. We had plenty of time scheduled to practice all of our walking in the great outdoors
procedures, and the first afternoon was a real eye opener. We saddled up and figured we would wander around
doing hand and arm signals for a while and then head back to the hooch. We got about 10 steps out of the
compound before Chief Rodd halted us and told us we were not going to move very far, but he wanted us to pay
complete attention to what we were doing. Now you have to understand, hearing “We are not moving very far” is
normally excellent news, and in all honesty we moved less than 1000 meters. But it took us almost four hours. That’s
not because we laid in the shade and rested, then walked in at the end. It’s because we moved that fucking slow.
Lawdy lawdy, we would take a step and then freeze, listen, smell, sense, commune, meditate, and many other very
passive things that you can do while crouched in the jungle carrying very heavy things in the stifling heat. The truth
is that is was instantly obvious that Chief definitely knew what he was doing, and also that it was kicking our asses.

Our re-invasion of Okinawa paled beyond insignificance when compared to the original. WWII was close to over
when we invaded, but Okinawa had to go before we could take a shot at the main islands of Japan. The Japanese
were dug into the caves and hills of a tropical coral aquarium toy and they were deep into the kamikaze mentality as
an enemy. They had no supplies and no real hope but somehow that made them tougher as every encounter was a
last shot at immortality for a Japanese soldier. The island was so unbelievably harsh that walking, or more
accurately crawling over much of it gave us incredible empathy for everyone who had to finish up a war here.

Our mode for sneaking into Jagoffia involved a rented,shrimp trawler with our rolled up Zodiac boats and gear
dropping us about 10 miles off the coast from our beach landing zone. We inflate the boats and drive to a link up
with our new allies, sounds not simple but doable. Before we could do all this water operating we needed a briefing
about the dangerous marine life. Our medic “Gorgeous” George  told us of the dangers from sea snakes. Now
George is from near Boston so he has that accent to start with, but he is also Portuguese so there is that flavor
thrown into the mix. But, the kicker was that he dipped Copenhagen snuff about half a can at a time. Add this
together and you have a completely incomprehensible individual. As he informed us of the dangers posed by sea
snakes he stated in a mélange of accents that I will not attempt to reproduce, “Now sea snakes are as deadly as
anything on earth, but they can’t bite you very easily because they have tiny little teeth. They almost gotta get a
little flap of skin like between your fingers and gnorr on it.” Now the only word I changed was gnaw to gnorr. You
have to hear that whole quote in the combination Boston, Portuguese, Copenhagen accent to truly love it, but once
he said gnorr we all lost it. I asked the question on everyone’s mind “George, what the fuck did you just say? It
sounded like you said the snake had to gnorr on you to hurt you.” “Yeah that’s right they gotta get a real little piece
of skin and gnorr on it. They got little tiny teeth, that’s all they can do.” He replied. I had to finish up with the
question on everybody’s mind “Are you saying that the snake has to gnaw on us in order to hurt us?” “Exactly” he
answered, “They gotta gnorr on ya’.”

We managed to navigate our way onto our home island without any gnorring related injuries. There we met up with
our guerrillas and moved to the base camp. Our guerrillas, for this exercise, were Marine aircraft mechanics and our
opponents were a Marine infantry unit portraying the military of Jagoffia. Actually, our opponents were a particularly
famous marine infantry unit with two unit flags obtained during a noble exploit, their difficulty was that we had
actually done extensive work under the canopy of this hellhole, and they had no clue how horrible the ground really
was.


Part of guerrilla warfare is taking people with few combat skills, like our mechanics, and teaching them to fight and
survive. Craig Lewis and I took a patrol out to practice some of theses skills and along the way we came upon the
other famous island snake, Habu the pit viper. This sweet critter was also in George’s briefing and we were informed
of the nastiness of it’s venom and it’s inch and a half long fangs. When our point Marine froze and pointed to one
coiled on a rock in a creek bed, Craig decided it was a good time to start his snakeskin collection. Somehow
Craiggles had confused the sea snake and habu. He thought that habu was the one with the tiny teeth that had to
gnorr on you. The Marines, who knew how dangerous the snake was, watched awestruck as Craig pulled out his K-
bar and started poking at the viper. I could see some of this from my position at the back, but I couldn’t believe the
answer when I asked one of the Marines what was going on. “Sgt. Lewis is killing a habu with his knife” came the
reply. “WHAT?” I hissed. “Yeah, he told us to let him know if we saw any ‘cuz he wanted the skin” the private
informed me. “Holy Shit!” was all I could manage. I hurried to where Craig was crouching down doing his best
Crocodile Hunter imitation with the snake draped over his not very long knife blade. “Drop it you fuckin’ idiot” I told
him. He flashed me his most charming, dumbass smile and said, “Relax man. This is habu, remember “they gotta
gnorr on you” you know, George, all that shit.” “Drop the fuckin’ snake Craig.” I commanded, “That was sea snakes
that gnorr. THAT is a fuckin’ habu with big fuckin’ teeth.” Craig did the best job of turning ghost white I have ever
seen for a black man, promptly dropped the snake and jumped several feet backward. I then did the bright thing
and dropped a BAR (big ass rock) on the snake, which up ‘til then had been too amazed to bite the fool.

I grabbed Craig who was shaking pretty good and said, “You are one lucky motherfucker. If that thing had bit you I
think I might’ve just let you die ‘cuz that was Darwin Awards quality stupidity.” “Oh my God” was all Craig had left.
“Alright now get your shit together,” I told him, “Those Marines think you did that shit on purpose. We’ve got the
makings of an excellent legend here. These fucker’s are gonna be telling the story of crazy Sgt. Lewis who kills
vipers with a K-bar, for the rest of their lives. You gotta play this off like you meant it.” That was something Craig
could buy off on, so he sucked it up and headed back to tell the troopies not to try this at home because we were
trained professionals. He graciously donated the skin to one of the Marines who “cured” it with salt from his MREs
and made a hatband for his flop hat. The problem was once the story got out all our guerrillas wanted to be mighty,
snake slayers and pretty soon our base camp looked like a taxidermy shop with hides tacked to every tree, most
perfectly, harmless varieties.

One night as we were hanging around watching Ranger TV, which means we had a fire, Chief Rodd informed us of
a wish he had. We had been discussing how much it must have sucked to be the Brits in the movie Zulu or Zulu
Dawn, just knowing that by the end of the day somebody was going to jab you in the guts with a very, nasty blade.
Chief said, “I always wanted to see one of those fanatical charges, everyone screaming and going berserk, but
instead of tribal paint everybody is doused with chem-lite juice and glowing.” We all looked at him like he was crazy.
“Yeah, I think that would be an amazing sight” he mused. We filed this under more strange things about Chief until a
few days later when we were planning a raid on the base camp of the Jagoffians. Technically they keep score in this
exercise through deaths confirmed by exercise controllers, and we all had our military laser tag gear on. But, by this
stage in the game we had used our home field advantage to gain a really ridiculous lead. Essentially we had killed
their entire unit and all their vehicles more than twice, while we had suffered 2 dead and 2 wounded. This meant
that even if we got completely wiped out on this raid, we still won, to the extent that mattered. Craig and I were
leading the assault, scheduled for the wee hours of the morning, and Chief Rodd’s wish came to mind. “We should
do it man” I told Craig. “The chem-lites?” he asked. “Yeah our junior, snake slayers would love that shit and
anything that makes Chief happy has to be good.” I replied. So a plan was hatched. We had no trouble convincing
our born-again, hard mechanics to try it. By now they were past that Lord of the Flies transformation point and
would have smeared themselves with their own dung if we said to, so chem-lite juice was no sweat.  

Since guerrillas swim like fishes among the people (no more Mao references, I promise) and the government forces
by nature have fixed locations, we had a big advantage being able to hide our camp in the sticks while we knew
exactly where they were. They had a nice camp with GP medium tents with cots, showers and a mess tent, all in all
not bad accommodations. That also meant they had a lot of infrastructure for us to hit. Now these guys weren’t
morons, they had observation points and other security out, but as long as you stayed out of the jungle you were
exposed. We had been hitting them repeatedly for several weeks and actually got a message from exercise control
saying we had to stop knocking down their radio antennas because it was unsafe. Whatever. We gathered our band
of warriors and told them what we had in mind and as expected we got an enthusiastic response. We figured telling
anyone else might cause an “I don’t want to deal with the fall out” decision from our leadership, so we maintained
the much simpler “It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission” mentality and continued our planning. We had
plenty of chem-lites and the only issues were over who got what color. Our leathernecks turned this into Halloween
and all sorts of costumes were improvised that would have done Braveheart proud, including spears, bow and
arrows, and all of their snake parts.

We told Chief Rodd that he might want to be in the overwatch position looking at the objective when we made the
assault that morning, without much more than a “just trust us” for a reason. We hit the camp at 0300 and opened up
by lobbing some very cool 40 mm grenade rounds that acted like aerial burst fireworks and flares right on top of
their tents. Now that it was nice and lit up, and they were good and awake, we threw a ton of multi-colored smoke
grenades all around one side of their perimeter. When we had a good cloud brewing, we let loose our dogs of war
and 50 screaming, neon-glowing savages came boiling down the hill toward the amazed defenders. They were so
shocked by the spectacle they emulated the poor habu and forgot to shoot the fools. Our guys shot their guns,
threw their spears, and chucked a smoke grenade on top of one of the tents burning it down. All in all it looked a lot
like a rave in Hell. When we got back to our base, Chief Rodd told us he found the entire event immensely satisfying
and when the inevitable backlash came from above, he told all the whiners he couldn’t believe what the defenders
told them, and it most certainly wasn’t us, so we basically skated.

One afternoon our Gs ambushed a Humvee with one of their Lieutenants and a driver. The LT was declared dead,
but the driver became a POW. Now, in addition to our team of 10 guys another SF guy from our unit was acting the
part of guerrilla chief for our ex-mechanics. I mentioned that our guys had transitioned from a bunch of rear echelon
mechanics to their own tribe of killers. This led, inevitably, to a need to kill “Piggy”, and the poor Humvee driver had
no idea that he had just assumed that role. The ambush was not planned and when it went down none of us were
with our guerrillas. This lack of supervision led them to go a “little” apeshit. The first thing they did was strip the kid
to his underwear and stake him spread-eagled on the ground. Not good, but not that bad so far, but from there it
was all downhill. They figured they would interrogate him and gain some valuable information so they started to put
the screws to him. They collected some of their snake carcasses, and skulls and began threatening to poison him
with a vial of habu venom, which was actually oil for the guns. Still not completely over the edge yet, but they are
definitely dangling their toes. They got out their snake stickers and threatened to cut his balls off if he didn’t talk.
Now the kid was definitely worried but he figured this was an official military exercise and they couldn’t actually hurt
him could they. Right?

Well after exhausting their repertoire of ridiculous threats they went to get their chief, who was a reasonably senior
guy from another company in our unit. At this point he should have been the voice of reason and told them to untie
the poor fucker and give him his clothes back. It didn’t quite go down that way though. Hal lost his ever lovin’ mind
and joined in the torment of “Piggy”. He even upped the ante and pulled out his .45. Now he wasn’t a complete
lunatic, so he had dummy rounds, which look exactly like live ammo. He started really fuckin’ with the kid and
threatening to shoot him if he didn’t cave. He bent down and showed the kid as he loaded the dummy ammo in a
magazine and puts the magazine in. He then stuck the barrel right in the middle of his forehead and jacked a round
into the chamber. At this point the kid cracked wide open and started bawling. He gave up his name, address,
girlfriend, mom’s maiden name and everything he knew about his unit and their defenses. Now at first this seemed
like a major coup for us when we heard all they found out, and we called in all the info to our higher headquarters.
But later all our guerrillas were talking about the G chief and how he made that poor fucker cry. Hal couldn’t contain
himself and was bragging about sticking his gun in the kid’s face. By this point we had released the kid and he was
back with his unit and not too long after that we got a radio call telling us to send our now ex-guerrilla chief to the
nearest landing zone for a helicopter ride to the rear. He got ample opportunity to explain why he thought holding
US Marine privates at gunpoint was a good idea to the sergeant major and we had a similar conversation with our
tribe.