The spider, what it wants more than hamburger is that I should light a cigarette and blow smoke at her so she can suck it in through her spiracles and get some nicotine on her brain. Gets this look like, “Come on, baby, drive me crazy!” It’s just a tiny spider brain. Say, “Jes’ a little puff would do it, mah man.”

But I look at the spider and say, “Suffer, darlin’! It’s for ya own good. Take it from a man who knows.”

Pot Shack

SHAKE AND BAKE​” was much more than what you might call a gung-ho Marine. Second Lieutenant Baker took it one step further. To another realm altogether. This man could drop down a “junk-on-the-bunk” faster than the legendary Sergeant Chesty Puller ever snapped a four-fingered salute off the brim of his Eisenhower piss-cutter. Lieutenant Baker could put out a “junk-on-the-bunk” faster than Doc Holliday slapped leather in the O.K. Corral and pumped hot lead at a half dozen or so of the Clanton Gang from the nickel-plated barrels of his single-action Colt .44’s. Dropped them Clanton boys like sacks of cement. This was how fast and emphatically Baker could lay out his gear. He could strip down his M-14 and reassemble it blindfolded faster than any other man in the company could complete the said feat with benefit of 20/20 vision.

Baker’s boots and shoes were spit-shined like glass. The lieutenant could go through a tin of Kiwi dark brown shoe polish and a can of Brasso in a month whereas for most Marines said quantities of the above were quite enough for a four-year tour. Give Baker a compass and a topographical map and one could bear witness to—indeed, become a part of—the elusive, semimystical Tao of military science. Such were Baker’s leadership skills that his every thought, word, and action could propel a lesser personality into selfless, right actions in the service of the Big Green Machine. Under Baker’s influence a Marine no longer thought about himself and his personal woe or travail, that Marine gladly followed orders for God and country. Even misfit individualists such as myself were mesmerized by Baker.