Being an old Yankee from New England, I've gotten a good education since moving to Oklahoma.
Fire ants, chiggers and the occasional scorpion are not my favorite critters.
Talking about Oklahoma reminds me of Army days....I spent about a year and a half of my life in various artillery schools at Ft. Sill Oklahoma. Ft. Sill had a great skeet club, and there were lots of other opportunities for shooting, so I had a pretty good time there. Didn't much care for the heat and humidity in the summer, but always enjoyed the thunderstorms. During my first tour there some buddies and I had a good time hunting crows on the Fr. Cobb crow roost.
Sometimes wild critters were pretty fierce, but most of the time the biggest danger to all soldiers was fellow soldiers doing stupid stuff. One time in artillery school at Ft. Sill our training battery was out on a live fire field exercise with M109A1 155 mm howitzers, and after firing about 400 rounds during the day from a firing point that was covered with deep dry grass, we were "attacked" by infantry at about midnight - when the wind was blowing at about 20 mph. Somebody who wasn't thinking fired a flare rocket, and in about 30 seconds we had a 400 ft. wide grass fire coming right at us - with about 1,000 pounds of powder in the powder pits behind us, and maybe 200 rounds of high explosive ammo still on the gun line. You've never seen a more highly motivated fire fighting effort.... we got it put out in time, even though all we had was hand tools.
Then there was the time in Korea that one of the multiple launch rocket platoon sergeants decided to try and cross a steep ravine on the side of a mountain that had recently been filled with loose dirt, and still had water running down the ravine under the dirt. Needless to say, the dirt wouldn't support 30 ton tracked rocket launchers, which started sliding sideways down the ravine - with about 1000 vertical feet to the bottom. It took every recovery vehicle in the battalion and the entire battalion maintenance section working in waist-deep mud close to a week to get the last vehicle out of there - during November with daily highs in the 30s and steady rain all day and all night.
Ranger School in Georgia and Florida involved lots of safety issues from both wild critters and other soldiers. We were outdoors most of the time - including sleeping on the ground - so most of us were covered with chigger bites, ticks, etc., and run-ins with eastern diamondbacks, pygmie rattlers, copperheads, cottonmouths, coral snakes, and aggressive bees to which almost everybody is allergic (bee bites kill more soldiers in Ranger School than anything else) were everyday events. Just about everything in the coastal swamp of FL bites, stings, scratches, jabs with thorns, or cuts. Crossing the tidal creeks on Eglin Air Force Base in FL was always an adventure. The ones I remember had a quarter mile of mangrove swamp on each side, and the creeks themselves are about 30 yards wide, up to 30 feet deep with a nearly vertical drop to the bottom at each side, and are full of gators, cottonmouths, and sharks. All movement was done at night without lights, so you never knew what was right next to you in the water as you waded through the swamps to the creeks. Once at the creek, one guy would swim a rope across and tie it to something solid on the other side. Then the platoon would tie it off to something solid on the near side and use snap links to attach packs, machine guns, radios, etc. to the rope, and swim them across. Then the last guy on the near side would untie the rope, and swim across. When you're the first or the last guy across, swimming in total darkness, you feel exactly like a minnow on a hook....
Good times.... and my wife wonders why I don't worry about climbing the mountain before daylight and coming back down after dark when I'm hunting elk.
