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When I was in the Navy down at Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Florida, I helped a skunk get its head out of a glass jar.

I was on watch one night and one of my squadron mates (a real redneck from Mississippi) and I had to walk out and do a security check on the flight line. When we walked out, we saw a skunk in a grassy area near a chain link fence walking backwards in a jerky, meandering zig-zag generally backing in our direction.

It was very odd, and I had never seen an animal do that, so I retreated about ten feet in the opposite direction. The guy from Mississippi said in that funny accent of his “Don’t worry-if it’s got its head stuck in a jar, it won’t spray you as long as you don’t startle it or act threatening.”

Now, I had no idea if this was true or not. But he said “Come on, let’s go help it.” and turned to walk over, so...I went with him. He said “Just be calm and relaxed.” which I did, then he said to me “Put your foot on top of the jar so it can pull its head out.”

That seemed kind of crazy to me, but I figured if he was standing next to me he wouldn’t be setting me up) so...I did it, and the skunk popped his head out of the jar and ambled away with that weird waddling motion they have, seeming to pay no attention to us. (In retrospect, I sometimes laughed when I whimsically imagined that was its way of thanking us...by making us feel completely non-threatened as it walked away, which as a human to a skunk, is kind of a considerate thing!)

By the way, when I said, his accent was funny, it wasn’t that it was strange or foreign sounding… It just made me laugh coming out of him. I liked him immensely, me being a Yankee, and all, and he was a real redneck from Mississippi, gangly and thin with a round head and prominent ears. He had a great big grin and always had a big chaw of tobacco in his cheek, or a quantity of snuff under his lower front lip. It made it bulge hilariously outwards!

In the humorous way he would relate his liberty adventures to me, I thought he was the most degenerate person I knew! But he was also the most amiable, good natured person I knew, always untroubled, happy, with that grin, distorted by either snuff or chaw, and that made him very interesting to me. One day, he revealed to me that he was a preacher, and got his license to preach (if there were even such a thing, I don’t know) at sixteen or something like that.

And I looked at this extremely gregarious, happy degenerate, and tried to visualize him as a “preacher”, and it was so impossible, that I thought “It has to be true”.

I have no idea what happened to him. It would be nice to think he had a good life. I liked him a lot, but I went ashore with a different group, so I never really knew if he was telling me the truth about his “adventures” or not. But I will say, the two guys he often went ashore with were pretty wild guys (both from the South) and I had been in the same bar with them ashore and had a chance to see them on liberty once when our paths crossed...their reputation was not undeserved. So if he hung out with those guys, is was not hard to imagine the things he told me were true.