Did I ever tell you about the time Ricky got 17 staples in his head?
Thursday, August 14th, 2008We were at some bar in Killeen, Texas. It was me, Mike and Jamie. Mike was one of the Sgt’s in my unit and Jamie was my room mate. Yes I was roomates with a dude named Jamie…I’ve got stories about him for a future date. Anyway, we were having a drink and one of our friends Ricky was there, but not with us. It was a Saturday night and there were a lot of military folks out in the bars. Ricky went out with us a lot, but he also went out with his local friends. He grew up in the Killeen area and knew a lot of civilians. This particular night he was pretty well drunk and some kind of altercation broke out between Ricky and a civilian dude. I couldn’t hear was they were saying, but I remember Ricky screaming and then shouting something along the lines of “do it then you big pussy”. Then I saw the guy crack Ricky over the head with a pool stick. The dude was holding the small end and hit Ricky with the fat end. I remember thinking how that must have hurt, but it didn’t seem to faze Ricky. He just laughed and said something that we were too far away to hear.
Mike simply smiled his “this is going to be fun…but not really” smile and stated rather simply, “Time to go.” I volunteered to get Ricky and we hustled out the door. By the time we left the bar was getting violent and the police were pulling into the parking lot as we were leaving it. (I normally don’t find that art imitates life, but just like in the movies, every bar fight I every witnessed in person started as an argument between two people and seemed to escalate into a full on bar clearing brawl. I just always accepted it as a sure thing…maybe I just hung out in seedy places and the patrons were prone to violence.)
We took Ricky out of the bar and he didn’t seem to be even the least bit affected by the pool stick hitting him, the bar fight, or the blood gushing from his head wound. He wasn’t even mad. He claimed to be friends with the guy and it was a misunderstanding of some sort. He was pretty drunk. We took him to the ER at the hospital on Ft. Hood. He ended up getting something like 17 staples in his head to close the wound. The Dr. was amazed that Ricky was walking around and laughing about it. Ricky is one of the toughest guys I ever met, but the entire time we were at the hospital he was worried that his wife would be mad at him. He wanted us to lie to her but he couldn’t come up with a convincing story to teller. We didn’t want to lie to her because we liked her…and we were afraid she would be mad at us if she found out the truth. I think we ended up telling her a modified version of the truth. We just happened to be at the same bar as Ricky (true) and saw him get hit in the head (true) by some guy for no reason (partial lie). I think that some part of her knows there was more to the story and she asked me about it many times. Unfortunately Ricky was too drunk to remember what he said and we honestly didn’t know what it was all about. Note: As soon as a fight breaks out in a bar, leave. Don’t finish your beer; just grab your buddies and leave. You don’t want to stick around for the cops and you surely don’t need 17 staples in your head. ����
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