Replies

One day, long long ago when I was in the infantry, we were on a field exercise at Fort Hood, Texas, and had set up in a copse of live oaks. We were on a one-day downtime during the exercise and so everyone was pretty much catching up on their sleep.

Our platoon sergeant set up his hammock and was, pretty quickly, very deeply sawing some Z's when we noticed that the trees around him were full of squirrels. So we decided to have a little bit of fun.

We gathered up some peanut butter cans and jelly cans from our C-rations and quietly smeared them all over the ropes that were holding up his hammock. Then we sat way back to watch nature take its course.

Obviously the squirrels were used to people being nearby because it didn't take very long before they were down on the trees, just chewing away at the peanut butter-and-jelly covered ropes.

By the time our platoon sergeant recovered after his abrupt drop, we were all "snoozing" away in our positions ...