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Love it! I LOVED playing football in the mud.

When I was in the Navy as an 18 year old guy, playing tackle football with no pads and helmets, that was as irresponsible a thing as I ever did.

We were playing with a bunch of other high-spirited 18 year old guys, and it was rough play.

I have some great pictures from after I purchased my first SLR camera with a telephoto lens (back in the mid-Seventies) and took some pictures of us playing in the mud...I never developed that film, and it sat in a drawer for nearly ten years before I wondered enough what was on them that I sent them in to be developed...and those were some of the pictures.

My overriding memory of that day, though, is playing center when a guy in our squadron named Faragasso lined up on defense in front of me.

As I snapped the ball, he brought his fists and arms up in front of him while I was still looking down, and he hit me square in the bridge of my nose. (Note-I don’t think Faragasso meant for that to happen, and the fact we didn’t get into a fight kind of buttresses that. When you play tackle football without any pads or helmets, that kind of thing happens.)

I was wearing plastic, black-framed Navy issued glasses that were derisively known as “BCD Glasses”, which stood for “Birth Control Device Glasses”.

Well, when he hit me, those glasses broke clean in half, and the razor sharp edge of one of them was driven into the fleshy area right up above your nose and between the eyebrows.

I got up, that gooey dark mud smeared all over me including my face, and when I put my mud-soiled hand up to my face, when I looked it it, there was blood all mixed in with the mud.

Clutching both halves of my mud spattered glasses, I left the game and went into the barracks to clean up and see if I needed to get stitches. Gazing in the mirror, there was a curved gash about a quarter inch long, but I decided against the stitches.

I got into the shower, where were fed by steam heated, scalding hot water. It was dangerously hot. See, you could adjust it, and it was an endless supply, never ran out.

The problem was, there was a large row of urinals on the same cold water circuit, and when one was flushed, the cold water moderating input in the water mix being sprayed dropped out for about half a second, and the wonderful, bottomless shower changed from nice and hot to 2nd Degree burn water.

And the real problem wasn’t someone flushing one of those urinals while you were showering, it was someone who was focused on playing a “prank” on you by flushing the urinal. People often didn’t flush if they heard someone showering, or would even call out before doing it. But the people who were intent on their “prank” were the real bastards.

I got scalded in there a few times, one time so badly the top of my scalp burned for about a week. I became so tuned in while showering that, if the water pressure dropped suddenly, even if in nearly imperceptible way, I would frantically leap in a panic out of the shower stream to avoid being burned.

I married my wife nearly ten years after I got out of the Navy, and she can attest that we were married for at least 20 years after that before I finally stopped jumping out of the shower any time the water pressure dropped! It took me a long, long time to break that habit!

Anyway, as I lingered in that bottomless hot shower, washing the mud, blood, and soreness from my body, as a final indignity, some joker came in and flushed the urinal and I was totally unprepared. I got burned pretty good there.

And I have since sported a small curved scar dead between my eyes that was caused by the sharp edge of my broken glasses.

With age, it has faded, and I have to look more carefully to see it, but it is still there, and every time I see it, I smile and remember what it used to be like to be 18 years old and invincible...:)