“Did you even get coffee this morning?” I asked the soldier.

“Yeah, I got some coffee but it was garlic coffee.”

“Garlic coffee?”

“Yeah. I dumped what I thought was creamer into my coffee but turns out it was garlic.”

“Oh my God. You drank it?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Cause I’m lucky, lucky, lucky!” he said. He’s been chanting this all week after one thing after another befalls him. ‘Yep, I’m lucky all right. Must be that Mercury is flying.”

“Retrograde,” I said. “Mercury is retrograde.”

“Yeah. Mercury is flyin’ all right. But that coffee wasn’t that bad. Garlicky but not bad,” he said.

~~
“Yeah, well they say that about us in Special Forces. They say we’ll eat anything and it’s pretty much true. We will.”

“Yeah…”

“Yeah. What choice do we have. It’s not like you can pack enough food on one of these missions. It’s not like you can bring a suitcase. So we learn to live on what’s there. We learn about plant life. We learn about which bugs you can eat. Which are good for you. Which you probably shouldn’t eat… unless you have to. If you have to, you have to.”

I laughed.

“Well people may not eat this stuff all the time but that doesn’t mean it tastes bad. And that doesn’t mean it’s not nutritious either.”

“Hmm. Okay. So you’re telling me you crawled through the jungle on your belly for umpteenth miles, eating bugs?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly what I did. And I loved doing it too. I love to sneak up on people and surprise them. They aren’t expecting me at all. They think they are going to be able to keep doing what they’re doing but they’re not once I get there.”