Sitting on the truck was my only time to savor the experience, as soon as we got to our assigned campsite, the Army put us to work setting up tents. The heat wasn't so bad, now that I'd had time to get used to it, but the extra gravity was a bitch, and the burnt smell had saturated my nose. A staff sergeant assigned me, Cornpone and five others to set up a large medical structure, made of prefab insulated wall panels. It was tougher than it looked. "Let's start with this side wall section," I said, hoping that the sooner the tent was complete, the sooner we could go for chow.

There was a muffled sound like a really long, high-pitched fart, then the moaning started.

"Is that, bagpipes? WTF?" Cornpone exclaimed.

"Yeah, there's a British battalion on the other side of the camp." I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, to where I'd seen the Brits building their encampment.

"And they play bagpipes? For real? I thought that was an Irish thing."

Garibaldi scoffed. "Scottish, not Irish, you bonehead. Damn, don't you know nothin'?"

Valdez said "Hey, you hear the one about the Scottish guy? He's sitting at a bar, drowning his sorrows in whisky."

"Everybody got a good grip on it?" I asked "Lift with your legs, not your back."

Cornpone snorted. "Damn, Bish, you sound like my mother. We got this."

"So he says to the bartender," Valdez grunted with the effort, "he says, so, you build thirty houses, and when you walk down the street, do people say 'there goes MacDougal, the home builder? no, they don't'."

We got the wall up on top of our knees, and I told the team to get under it, and lift it to our shoulders. The extra gravity was killing me.

"Then he says 'you save five children from a burning building, and when you walk down the street, do people say 'there goes MacDougal, the rescuer? no, they don't."

"Valdez, will you shut up a minute? All right, people, lift!" I said in my best US Army voice of authority.

We got that bitch of a wall unit up above our shoulders, and were winning the fight against gravity, when Valdez gasped "'Then MacDougal says, ‘but you fuck one sheep’-."

We lost it. Men scattered as the wall unit came crashing down, and people were rolling on the ground laughing. I tried to bark an order, but I was laughing so hard that a snot bubble came out of my nose, and when people saw that, they fell over laughing again.