Spread it on!! *True Story Sunday*

Hey guys, welcome to True Story Sunday. Today I'm riding on a road. They're building an expansion from David to Boquete. They're going to have four lanes of traffic from David to Boquete, which will be really nice. My story today comes from the four months that I spent on a humanitarian deployment in Nicaragua. This is the place where I became friends with with Mitch, my adventure buddy from the Panama trip, Utah to Panama on motorcycles. Mitch and I were in the same National Guard unit, but we were in different teams. So we never really worked together. I'd see him once in a while, but I honestly don't even know if I knew his name before we both volunteered to go to Nicaragua. We were the same rank and basically the same age, and we stayed in the same tent. So it was like by default we became friends. It also turned out that we had a lot in common. So Mitch and I took off to in Nicaragua. That's where Mitch and I fell in love with Central America, and that's where we first came up with the idea that we wanted to start traveling around Central America. This is just background for my story. While we were there, we decided we liked Central America so much that instead of flying home when the army left, we wanted to backpack home. We were just going to take our rucksacks and what little clothing we had, and we were just going to hitchhike home. The army wouldn't let us do that. We even went to the JAG officer on the base and said, hey, can you write up a document that we can sign that releases the army from any, you know, if we get, if we end up dead, it will release the army from any consequences or whatever from us dying, and the JAG officer wouldn't do it. So we said, well, you know, if you don't do it, we're just going to buy a plane ticket back here and backpack home that way, and he said, that's fine. We can't stop you from doing that. So that's what we did, and Mitch and I actually went on a backpacking trip from Costa Rica all over Central America. So, but that's not what my story is. What my story today is, is about the time when I was chosen for guard duty. We stayed, we built like a tent city on a Nicaraguan artillery test, testing range. So we were always finding artillery shells. It was kind of funny because we were, as we were building the base, we kept finding like unexploded ordnance, you know, shells that they had launched out there that didn't explode, and we would bring this up to the base commanders, like, hey, we're on an artillery range. We're building our living quarters on an artillery range, and so they decided that the helicopters shouldn't land there because they didn't want the helicopters to get blown up, but they, the rest of us, they just let live there. Luckily, nobody ever got injured from stepping on something they shouldn't step on, but we basically lived on an artillery range, and the helicopters not allowed to land there because, because there was artillery there. Oh, it looks like I'm at the end of this road already. Boy, I bet I could get across that bridge, but let's have a closer look. Oh no, there's a guy there. He's not gonna like me. So I'm gonna have to go back. I was hoping for some excitement, but I don't want to get in trouble. So that's where we live. We live on an artillery range in Nicaragua, and I remember one day we were digging up some stuff to lay electrical cables. That was my job. I was the electrician, and we found a femur. We found a femur bone, and I took it. I thought it was a femur anyways. I took it because it was small, and I took it to the medic, and he goes, yep, that's a femur. It's either of a child or a very short man, so what an interesting place. That's not my story, though. My story comes from when I had to do guard duty. We did have helicopters. There was like three Black Hawk helicopters that we had on base, and they were used for, you know, if someone got hurt, we had to have helicopters to airlift them out. There was, there's a base in Honduras, and where we were in Nicaragua was very close to the Honduran border, so anywhere, if anyone were to get hurt, they could be picked up in the chopper and taken to the base in Honduras, and that was the closest available, you know, emergency facilities that were run by the Americans, so I got chosen to guard the helicopters one night, and while we were on this base, we did not take care of our own security. The Nicaraguans did that for us. Everywhere we went, we had Nicaraguan soldiers, and they had their AK-47s and their pistols or whatever, and they were our guards. They made sure that nothing bad happened to us. Even around the perimeter of our base, we didn't guard that either. It was all the Nicaraguans. We did have some storage containers that were loaded with M-16s. I have no idea about ammunition or anything. I'm assuming that they must have had some, but so I get chosen for for guard duty, and I say, okay, where do I, where do I draw my weapon? Do I have to sign it out or what? Because the helicopters were considered, the helicopters were considered very, you know, obviously very valuable pieces of equipment, so they didn't want anybody sneaking in and messing with the helicopters, so they would choose two people for guard duty to watch the helicopters. This seemed to only happen towards the end of our stay there. I'm not sure why they started doing it, but I never had to do it until the very end, and they only asked me once. They picked an officer, and they gave him a nine millimeter, and I don't know if he had ammunition or not. I think that he did, and so when I asked where, where do I draw my weapon, the sergeant that, that selected me for guard duty jokingly said, you don't get a weapon, bring a stick, and I was like, wait, you're kidding me, right? I'm supposed to, what am I gonna, I'm just gonna be the guy that gets shot first then? If somebody actually does come in and try to mess with the helicopters? This is a joke, right? We're in the army. Give me my weapon. I'm trained how to use it. I'm not gonna just go on a rampage or anything, but they wouldn't give me the weapon, and he jokingly told me to bring a stick, so I went back to my, my tent, and we had, we were sleeping in cots, and when you set up a cot, it has these two long poles with canvas in between them, and, and then at the ends, there are like end pieces, and so I took out one of the end pieces, and I, I took some 550 cord, and I, and I tied it around both ends, and I made a sling out of it, and then I took a butter knife, a plastic butter knife from the chow hall, and some duct tape, and I, I duct taped that to the end. Where am I going? Sorry, I don't want to go this way. I duct taped that to the end of this, of this cot, this piece of the cross beam of a cot, and then I wrote, because it was towards the end of the deployment, I was so, you just get fed up with how stupid the army is after so long, after dealing with, with it for so long, and I, so I wrote on the end of this, of this cot, no, not on the end, but just across the side, I wrote, spread it on, because it was like, it was like my way of saying, I, I don't care how stupid your orders get, I'm going to follow them, so, you know, spread on your stupidity, and it was also kind of playing words, because there was a as a bayonet, and I actually have some pictures of this somewhere, I'll see if I, if I can dig them up and post them, but I remember everybody in my tent was like, oh, oh no, once in a while, I would lose it, when I was in the army, I would just completely lose it, and my buddies, like Mitch would be like, oh boy, there goes Grassley again, he's, he's off the deep end once again, and, and some people would try to talk me out of it, but Mitch always kind of knew, Mitch always just kind of sat back and laughed, he knew there was no, there was no talking sense into me when I, when I get in one of my rampages like that, so I go and report for duty with this, with my stick, with my, with my, my cross beam of the cot, and, and I start, and I'm sitting there with the officer, you know, me and this officer, and this officer acts like he's never seen a gun before in his life, and he keeps like taking it apart and putting it, and he keeps like pulling the action back and slamming it forward, and I'm like, oh, you know what, dude, I'm gonna leave before you shoot yourself, so I went and like, and started patrolling the base, just like walking around, and once in a while, I would see somebody, you know, I would, the Nicaraguan guys with their AK-47s are walking around looking at me like I'm, like I'm, like they can't believe what they're seeing, like why does this guy have a piece of his cot with a butter knife on it, and, and once in a while, I would pass by an officer. There were a lot of officers on the bases, U.S. officers, and when you have a weapon, so I was walking around like I was marching with this piece of cot, and I was holding it like, like this, and when you see an officer, you're supposed to salute them, and I would snap it, I would snap it forward like this and say something stupid like, there's, there's these sayings that the army likes to use, like you'd snap it to attention, say, courage and fidelity, sir, and then keep walking, and the officers were like, what, what in the hell, and so I think one of them went and told this sergeant who was like my boss, he was a sergeant first class, that's three stripes and two rockers, maybe he was a master sergeant or something, but we used to say about him, well, I've met a lot of stupid people in my life, but damn, this guy was so dumb, but somehow he was, you know, excelled in the military. Somebody went and told him that I was walking around with a stick on guard duty, guarding the helicopters, and he came and tracked me down and started, and started yelling at me and saying that I was an embarrassment to I was an embarrassment to the military, and I needed to go put that stick away and go and come back to guard duty and treat it like, you know, treat it more seriously, and I was like, um, no, I'm not going to do that. You ordered me to show up with a stick. If you didn't want me to look like a dummy, you shouldn't have ordered me to come here and look like a dummy, but this is what you told me to do. You told me to show up and look like an idiot, so I'm taking it to the next level. I'm being all I can be. This is, this is what you told me to do, so I continued to, uh, to use that stick on guard duty, and, um, I always felt like when you're somewhere like a, like a dusty hellhole in Nicaragua, they really can't make it any worse. Like, what, what are they going to do, send you home? Oh, please, please, no, don't send me home. That would be terrible. Um, so there's, yeah, there's really no, there's, I mean, especially when you're a specialist, you have the rank of specialist. You're not, it's, specialist to me was the best rank in the military because you're not a private, so you don't get crapped on by everybody, and you're not a sergeant, so you don't have the responsibility that comes with being a non-commissioned officer, where you have to, like, manage other soldiers and stuff. You're just this, you're kind of in this no man's land where you can get away with anything, so that's what I, uh, that's what I enjoyed doing, was, was trying to get away with as much stuff as I could. This is a vlog where I attempt to do as many U-turns as possible. I just saw another place I wanted to check out down here. Looks like they're building some houses. So I've got a lot of stories from my, from my time in Nicaragua because I was a specialist, and because I, I enjoyed getting away with, with so much. It was just like you were bored, and so you tried to get away with stuff. Like Mitch and I would have a beard growing contest, not allowed to have facial hair in the military, because the terrorists will win, you know, if you have facial hair. So we would have beard growing contests, and it wasn't really about who could grow their facial hair the fastest. It was about who was the best at avoiding the officers, because if you could avoid them for, for the longest amount of time, then, then they would never tell you to, hey, go shave, or hey, go cut your hair. We'd have, we would grow our hair super long, and, uh, and we'd also try to grow our beards, and one day this warrant officer saw us. We were both together, and he was like, hey, you guys, come with me, and he, and he marched us to the, uh, to the barber, and they, and they shaved us, and, no, they didn't shave us, but they cut our hair. Um, I had one, I had one more story that I wanted to tell. Let me see if I can remember it.