"THE INVASION"
About a year before I escaped from the Air Force I was transferred to an Air Base in Kansas in the winter of 1947. When I found my assigned barracks a door was open at one end and a snowdrift was coming right into the barracks. Way up at the other end there was a guy sitting real close to a coal burning pot bellied stove. First thing I said to him was �why in the heck (expletive deleted) did you leave that door open?� He say, �Well, I was busy writing a letter to my lovely wife who is in North Carolina and if you want it closed, do it yourself!�
Well, since I was a Sergeant and he was a lowly Private, I encouraged him to help me clear out the snow and help me get that door closed which he reluctantly did. In spite of that inauspicious beginning we fast became best of buddies. Ole Billy Bob was several years older than me and when I asked him what he was doing in the service he told me that he had enlisted so that he could become eligible for the GI Bill of Rights and get a college education and become a teacher.
Billy Bob was always clean and neat as a pin and was forever talking about his lovely wife and children. Since I was madly in love and about to get married we spent many an hour talking, drinking coffee and listening to ole Eddy Arnold singing his Country & Western songs. After I got married and brought my bride back to Kansas, she thought he was a great guy too.
Six years later I got word from ole Billy Bob that they were going to be doing some traveling and were going to drop by to see us. Both my bride and I were real excited about this, but little did we know what was coming. Late one night at about 10 p.m. on the day they were supposed to arrive, they did! When they piled out of their old car it looked like at least a dozen people came out of that car, but to tell the truth I think it was only two adults and four or five kids.
A few minutes after they arrived my wife said, �You all HAVE already eaten haven�t you?� Billy Bob�s lovely (term here is kinda loose) wife said, �Oh no, we haven�t eaten since noon!� Well, my bride had stored what she thought was a week�s supply of groceries for them and she fixed a big meal for them. When they sat down at the table to eat it was like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up all the food and by the time they got thru a whole week�s supply of groceries was done gone!
Ole Billy Bob�s wife never lifted a hand except for eating and apparently she didn�t know how to wash or dry dishes, but she was real good at sitting and watching my bride (and me) doing same. I reckon she must have been plum tuckered out from her travels. We found out that they had gone clear across the country invading other �friends� and had not spent one single night in a motel or hotel in three weeks.
The next day two or three of their kids plugged in a vacuum cleaner, managed to get it plum outside into the yard and started vacuuming up RED ANTS! Needless to say, this disturbed my bride somewhat, that is, by this time she was about to have a nervous breakdown! She did however, escape to the grocery store and get ANOTHER weeks supply of food (hopefully).
Now we then lived right in the middle of an oil field and there were lots of tall derricks all around. Well, it didn�t take a couple of those kids very long before they decided to climb up those derricks. When my boss saw them he almost had kittens and he came running up saying, �My God, look at them kids!� Well, the three of us went over to the derrick and encouraged them to come down and after promising them whatever they wanted they finally did.
When they finally left my bride had to stay in bed for several days and promised me that if they ever came back I was a dead man! So, being as intelligent as I always was, when I got a letter from ole Billy Bob after they got back home I put �Addressee Unknown� on it and had it returned.
About thirty years later we finally could talk about the invasion without my bride threatening me with my life!
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