Hogs, 1; Future Green Beret, Zip

Now, before I tell this story, I want all y’all to remember a few salient facts about cousin Dean: He was a Green Beret and served more than one tour in Vietnam, surviving fire fights, snake-infested jungles and SPIE extractions by helicopter. (SPIE meaning Special Patrol Insertion/Extraction. Translation: The chopper crew dropped him and his buddies ropes, they snapped themselves on and rode “home” dangling under the aircraft’s belly.) Not a lifestyle for the faint of heart, right? The man won a Bronze Star, for Pete’s sake!

I want you to remember these facts for two very important reasons: 1) Nobody in his right mind could doubt Dean’s courage. 2) The story I’m about to relate is even funnier when you remember that our hero would eventually become a member of one of the most elite fighting forces on the face of the planet.

For the benefit of you young’uns, I guess I’d better set the scene. We were living in Fair Oaks at the time, renting a two-story white house and a couple of acres we optimistically called a farm. The price of beef was pretty good back then, so my Dad had taken a baby step into the cattle business, buying a few calves, which he transported home in the family station wagon, giving rise to another story I’ll get to some other time.  Anyway, we had these calves, a couple of horses, some chickens and, most important for our present purpose, a few pigs.

Now, when I say “pigs,” you need to understand these porkers were anything but cute and/or potbellied.  We’re talking serious pigs here–long, white critters with deceptively endearing floppy ears that drooped over their beady eyes.  Listen, these babies were longer than most of you are tall, and they weighed more, too.  They definitely outweighed Dean.

Our cousin lived in Washington and would come to visit every year or so.  If you’d known him then, it would’ve come as no surprise to find out that he would join the Special Forces decades later.  As a matter of fact, if we’d known there was such a thing as Special Forces, we could’ve predicted he’d join them, because he was always pushing some envelope, one way or another.  Unfortunately, before the U.S. Army got hold of him, he didn’t always have the skills for whatever adventure he leaped into, often without looking.

Take the pig episode, for example.

Like a lot of folks who don’t have to do them day in and day out, Dean really liked doing farm chores.  Since those chores had quickly lost their bucolic charm with repetition, my sister and I were more than happy to let our cousin “farm” to his heart’s content.   The hard part was getting him to hold up while you gave him the benefit of hard-earned advice on the best way to go about things.

As I recall, it was overcast on the day in question.  The air was crisp, things were a little damp; the pig sty damper yet.  It was feeding time.  The pigs milled restlessly.

Dad handed Dean the bucket of feed, giving instructions as he did, because he knew his nephew had a hair trigger, and once he turned him loose there’d be no stopping him.  “Now wait ’til I distract ‘em.  Then, go straight to the trough, dump it in and get out of the way.”

It was good advice–or would’ve been, if my cousin had held still long enough to hear it–but once he got his hands on that bucket, he was off in a cloud of feed and in the sty before Dad got to the first period (the one after ‘em).

That was my cousin’s first mistake.

The second was taking his eye off the pigs, who’d locked onto him–or, to be more precise, the bucket he was carrying–the minute he stepped through the gate.

I’d like to give you a detailed account of what happened then, but chaos is hard to describe.

There was my cousin, holding the bucket at shoulder level, high-steppin’ panicked laps around the sty, screaming something to the effect of, “Help, Uncle Herb, get them off me!”

There were the pigs–a heavily muscled pack of grunting, squealing, ravenous predators–streaking after him, their beady eyes fixed firmly on the prize.

And there was my Dad, laughing so hard he was bent double, so hard he had tears running down his cheeks, gasping between guffaws, “Put the bucket down!  Drop the bucket!”

It would be anticlimactic to tell you Dean finally did drop the bucket–whether he did so out of sheer terror or because he finally managed to make out Dad’s instructions, we may never know–but as soon as he did, the pigs homed in on the spilled feed and forgot all about their hapless victim.   I wish I could remember the after-action spin my cousin put on the episode–he was a master spin artist, always transforming misadventure into thrilling adventure–but all I can see in my mind’s eye right now is the frantic pumping of his legs and that wildly swinging bucket.

If only I could get this story to his former comrades in arms.  I’m sure they’d know just what to do with it.