By: Bud Alexis<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I joined the Marine Corp reserve when I was in the 11th<\/sup>\ngrade, and each summer we would have to go to Camp Pendleton, Ca, for\ntraining. It was on one of these tours\nthat I had the following event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was early in the morning and we were having maneuvers up\nin the hills. I was posted on the top\nside of a hill, which was the rear of the main group. That was just in case any of the enemy forces\nwould try to attack from the rear. It\nwas a nice morning, cool, sun just coming up and peaceful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The hill was just steep enough that I could stretch out my\nlegs while I sat. I laid the barrel of\nmy rifle across my thigh and waited. I sat fairly close to some foliage but not\nin it, because I needed a wide view. \nAfter the sun had been up for a little while, I noticed some movement\ncoming out of the brush. That movement\nsoon became evident of a medium size diamond back rattlesnake. I was rather close to it so I didn\u2019t want to\nmake any sudden movements. I was about\nthree or four feet from the shrub, and by the time I realized what it was I\nfroze. The snake slithered next to my\nboot and began to sun itself. I mean to tell you it was up tight against my\nboot. All kinds of thoughts were running thru my mind. What if the enemy showed up right now. What if it tried to crawl up on me. What if, what if! Finally I decided that I would see if I could\nslowly, very slowly, get my rifle in position to shoot the thing. I very slowly moved my hand down to the\nsafety switch on my M-1, and took it off of safety. It made a clicking sound, that did not go\nun-noticed by the rattlesnake. It began moving it\u2019s head around looking for the\nsound. I froze again. Finally, to my relief it decided to slither\noff on past me. Oh, what a relieeeeeef\nit is. And, it was none too soon,\nmoments after that encounter, I saw a jeep with a machine gun mounted on it,\napproaching the hill at a high rate of speed. I was able to report it in time to save the\nday. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By: Bud Alexis I joined the Marine Corp reserve when I was in the 11th grade, and each summer we would have to go to Camp Pendleton, Ca, for training. It was on one of these tours that I had…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buds-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redhammer.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/rattlesnake.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pajfeR-aK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhammer.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhammer.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhammer.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhammer.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhammer.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redhammer.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":668,"href":"https:\/\/redhammer.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions\/668"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhammer.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhammer.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhammer.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhammer.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}