Never trust your friends when they're drunk. That's not advice it's a warning.

 

When I was in Airborne School We often stayed in a hotel just outside of Post on the weekends. It was called the LaQuinta, I think. It was right next door to a bowling alley that served the best hamburgers in the world. This story isn't about hamburgers though, it's about the LaQuinta, sort of.

 

The LaQuinta Inn was a block of old apartments or government housing that had been converted to hotel rooms. The result was that the LaQuinta had several buildings and most of the rooms were equipped with two bedrooms and a full kitchen. It cost about fifty or sixty bucks a night for a room, but if you got five or six guys to pitch in it was pretty cheap. The place was great, because they didn't seem to care what we did as long as we paid the bill. It was like staying at home on the weekends. Most of the rooms went to guys attending one of the various schools in Fort Benning. We had representatives from Airborne, RIP, Pathfinder, Air Assault, and even regular ol' Basic Training.

 

So we spent the whole weekend littering these rooms with empty liquor bottles and beer cans while watching The Green Berets over and over again and puking in the pool. It was a very testosterone filled environment. So one morning I wake up on the floor in front of the couch. I was naked and wrapped in a sheet. I was covered with minor scratches and abrasions. I felt extra-special bad. Not just normal hang-over bad, but hit by a truck bad. I couldn't remember what had happened or where my clothes were, or for that matter why I was all cut up. The last thing I remembered was leaving a party to get some fresh air. I had drank way too much, that was obvious. I interrogated my comrades to attempt to discover what had happened.

 

This was the story. I got drunk. For some reason I decided to climb onto the roof of one of the buildings. It wasn't that high, only a two story structure. Sometime after gaining access to the roof I removed my clothing and dispersed my garments in a random fashion. Then I passed out. After realizing I had been gone for some time, my friends began looking for me. They found my clothing were I had distributed it and some one saw one of my feet dangling off the edge of the roof. A couple of these friends gained access to the roof and spent a good amount of time discussing what to do with me. They could not safely carry me down, as the climb was to precipitous. They had no material to construct a hoist. They finally arrived at a drunken plan. One of them remembered reading about a person who had survived a fall from a great height because they had been unconscious, the person "went limp" and suffered no lasting damage. So they gently rolled me off the roof in to some shrubbery. Once it was discovered that I was alive and suffering from no ill effects I was wrapped in a sheet, drug up the stairs and dumped in the living room, whereupon I later awoke.

 

I was furious. Fighting broke out. My saviors decided I was a "poor sport", and that I had "no sense of humor".

 

Never trust your friends when they are drunk.