When I was in the Marines and stationed overseas in Okinawa, Japan, there was a field exercise that took us into the jungle. The area was an actual battle site during World War Two, and it wasn’t uncommon to find artifacts lying around. There were far fewer being found by the time I was there because the jungle overgrowth had reclaimed much of the terrain through the decades.
On the day that we returned to our base camp, I emerged from the jungle trail behind the other men. I was carrying a dusty old burlap sack and ran excitedly up to a group of men and I shouted, “Look at what I found out there, this thing is full of money!” My target was a particular man in my unit and I knew that mentioning money would snare him. Sure enough, as the group gathered around me, he shoved the others out of his way and grabbed the bag from me greedily, simultaneously turned it upside down with one hand to shake its contents loose while he reached into it with his other hand. Imagine his shock, horror and surprise when instead of loot, a six-foot long snake tumbled out. The look on his face, his body contortions, the way he tried to get as much distance from the snake as he could in a split second were all priceless. He did a 100-yard dash in no time, shouting at the top of his lungs. The group of men scattered as soon as they saw the snake hit the ground, but they all immediately saw it was completely motionless and joined me in laughter. We were all bent over with our stomachs aching at how hard we laughed, but the victim was halfway to Tokyo. The snake didn’t budge an inch, it was completely dead. As we began to call him back and assure him that it was just a joke, that the snake was dead, you would not believe the anger in his face and eyes at what I had done. He wanted blood, my blood, and the other men had to hold him back.
You see, I had knowingly selected the one man in the unit I knew was not only the most money-hungry (that was my hook), but was also deathly afraid of snakes to begin with. The snake was dead when I found it just one minute before, and in that split second I thought of pulling the prank. He felt like a fool and he hated me immensely for quite some time after that day. I categorize it as a bad prank, in retrospect.
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