First, I’ve decided not to try to keep track of the numbers of these posts. From now on, they’ll just start with FMS, and then a title for the story.
While I was stationed on Okinawa, my duties took me on deployment to the mainland many times. Most of the time, I would fly into Yokota Air Base, and then travel by bus or truck to Camp Fuji, nestled at the base of Mount Fuji. Actually, it was about 8000 feet up the mountain. That 8000 feet is just a SWAG (Silly Wild-Ass Guess), so don’t quote me on it.
On a serious note, before the funniness, Camp Fuji was the most beautiful and dramatic place I have been. Seeing this mountain just raise up out of the middle of a plain, with no other terrain in site, is amazing. When I got up in the morning one day, I looked away from the mountain, and realized that I was looking down on the clouds.
Back to the funny. In my first 8 trips to Fuji, I got exactly one (1) evening off. And that one barely counted, because I had to be up at 7 the next morning, to take care of the details of flying my artillery battery back to Oki. Since I had been to Fuji so many times, I knew just about all of the permanent personnel that were close to my rank. Since Fuji was such a small base, there were only like 200 permanent personnel there. There were, I think, 7 females on the whole base.
Since I had my one night out, after spending about 20 nights at Fuji, my friends in the Motor T group decided to take me out for a night on the town, in Numazu.
Numazu was about an hour’s drive from Fuji; at least, the bar we were visiting was. One of my buddies had heard about this bar from his Japanese girlfriend. She was meeting us there.
The bar was crap. We were the only people in there, except for a fat chick from New Zealand, and my friends’ girlfriend and her friends. I was the DD for the night. That didn’t last long, actually. At that time, I was big into drinking Tequila. One of the guys that came with us starting drinking it, and I decided to join him. I purchased 8 drinks, each of which cost 500¥ (~$5.00), and was equivalent to ~3 shots of tequila (they came in tumblers). Well, I drank 8 drinks that I know about. After the 8 drinks, I still had 1500¥ in my pocket. I’m not sure what happened to that money.
I know that I passed out on a couch in the back of the bar, after feeling up the New Zealand chick’s ass. I know that I needed a lot of help walking the mile or so back to where we parked the car.
When we got back to the car, I sat down on the gravel, and leaned against the right rear wheel. Then I started to puke. I made a puddle, then asked for help getting on my feet. One of the Jarheads I was with asked for the keys to the car, to get me in it.
The guy with the girlfriend was the one who drove. When we started yelling for the keys, he responded that he was coming, and then that he was almost there. What I didn’t realize until a couple of years later was that he was in his girlfriend’s car, having relations. He was serious when he said coming.
A few minutes later, he opened the car door, and I stumbled into the backseat.
I remember being in the back of the car, and feeling like I was going to puke. Then I remember puking. A lot. I was drunk enough that I thought I could catch the puke in my hands, and was trying to catch it and throw it out the window. It didn’t work so well.
When they got me back to my barracks, I collapsed into bed, after taking my pants and shirt off (inside out), and throwing them away. I got undressed in the laundry room, which was shared by everyone on that floor of the barracks.
At 6:30 or so, my boss, Sgt Scali, came to wake me up for the day. He told me to get showered, and that we would go to breakfast. Later, he told me that he came back around 7, to tell me that he was going to breakfast, and to meet him at the HQ building in half an hour.
The next thing I remember, it’s right about 8am, and Sgt Scali (who was a body builder) was pounding open my door, and screaming at me to get out of bed. I literally jumped from a prone position on the bed, and landed at attention about three feet from the edge of the bed. I was very confused, and didn’t understand what he was so mad about. I was only a couple of minutes late, after all.
That day, I couldn’t keep anything down, not even water. Finally, at about 1 pm, I managed to keep a pear down. One of my “friends” came over and asked me how I was feeling, and jiggled my head around. I told him it was my stomach, and not my head, so he jiggled my stomach. I threw up in the hallway, about 5 feet from the bathroom door, at a run.
Later that day, I finally managed to keep some Gatorade down. Do you remember the old Gatorade commercials, where the athlete drinks it, and you can see the fluid hit his stomach, and spread outward from there? I felt that. The first sip didn’t even make it to my throat; my mouth absorbed it completely.
Of course, since I was in trouble, Sgt Scali had been riding me all day long. He made me weigh every one of the 26 or so vehicles that we had to move that day, by myself. That consisted of dragging four 50 lb scales (they weigh 50 pounds, not read 50 pounds) in front of, say, a humvee. Then, I drive the hummvee onto the scales, get out, read the scales, pull the humvee off the scales, move the scales, and then park the humvee. After that, I get the next truck, and do it all again. 26 times. While incredibly hung over, and puking every few minutes.
Later that day, I talked to a friend in my unit, and he asked about me getting all drunk. I didn’t understand how he knew, since no one from my unit had been with us. Apparently, he ended up in the same bar, somehow, and had come to talk to me while I was passed out. When he woke me up to say hi, I apparently tried to deck him.
Luckily, I missed, and our friendship continued.
That night is why I don’t drink Tequila anymore, even after 9 years.
