Rules That Were Supposed to Help But Ended up a Big Fail

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Snakebit Strategies

My Dad was a corpsman with the Marines doing high desert training in the Mojave. They had a big problem with unidentified snakebites, ie, people would get bit but not identify the snake, so it was hard to find the right antidote. So my dad got all the Marines in a room and said, “If you get bit by a snake, bring it back here so we can identify it. Not even a full week later, they had to alter the wording a bit because a marine was bit by a rattlesnake and decided to bring it back without killing it. This man had carried this snake all the way back to base ALIVE, and the snake decided to let him know exactly how he felt about that by repeatedly biting his arm the entire time. Needless to say, that marine went home, and they made sure to hold another meeting where they told everyone to KILL the snake and then bring it back.

He kept the arm. They got him to the base hospital in roughly 50 minutes and gave him anti-venom. He was out for 6 weeks. This was in 1995 at 29 Palms (He calls it 29 stumps) 4th Marine Division, i.e., reservist marines out of Buffalo, New York.