Milestones

1983: Reporter Raoul Dunkin begins down the long road of abandoning teams when things get rough, quitting a dodgeball match due to some minor bone fracturing.

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Toucan Sam was a ham-eating son of a bitch. I'm not kidding, he could put it away like he was trying to sneak a pig through customs in lunchmeat form. It would make you sick just to watch this ham hound operate. This guy's bedroom smelled like a fuckin' Hormel factory, and that was just the bedroom. Nobody liked him, not even in a "he's a sick bastard, but what a character" kind of way, but few would argue that he wasn't the best plastic explosives man this side of Mozambique. True, few would argue that he was, but this was generally a pretty passive group who didn't like to rock the boat too much in either direction.

What they were, however, was experts. Were experts. Was. Is. Are still. If you needed an elite group to travel deep into the jungles of Vietnam to track down and capture a mysterious gorilla-thing with swords for arms and the head of a great white shark, these were your men. And luckily for billionaire collector R. Hyram Mozzle, this is exactly what he hired them for. Because they were lousy at soccer and didn't get along all that well, and they weren't much to look at. Assholes, all of them. Their hygiene was also questionable. One of them was hideously fat. But they were brave, probably, and they were experts who carried around all kinds of high-tech gadgets and guns so improbably huge they would make your head spin, should you be shot in the head with one of them.

And most importantly, they all believed in mysterious gorilla-things with swords for arms and a head like a great white shark. Some would call them gullible. Others, undereducated. Still others would suggest that they didn't read the contracts and just thought that Vietnam sounded like a good place to get laid. They were all right.

Seated next to Toucan Sam on the dank and poorly lit cargo plane was Blisters McGee, the group's chef and personal trainer. Since McGee was the only one who ever sat near Toucan, some implied that they were friends. In actuality, Blisters had lost his sense of smell in a sulfur mining accident as a boy and he had no idea just how disgusting Toucan Sam was. He just liked to sit where there wasn't a bunch of guys crowding around, farting and telling sex jokes.

On the flight over to Vietnam, the men spent most of their time crowded around, farting and telling sex jokes, as all men do shortly before they die. The joking lent an air of congenital levity and camaraderie to the scene, which few thought would hang in the air like a nifty irony later when they're all laying in their own entrails and trying to crawl screaming away from the shark-headed gorilla thing that the locals all warned them about but they weren't scared because Jesus Christ are their guns big.

Sanchez was the technology expert, which is funny because he's Mexican. Most of the guys just figured he was there to be the first guy to be killed by the shark-headed gorilla thing, so that everybody else could start to think, "maybe this gorilla thing means business." They were pretty spot-on about that, since as it turns out technology doesn't do you a whole hell of a lot of good against a frenzied shark-headed gorilla that's nine feet tall and has eight rows of teeth. You eventually just have to club its stupid head in with a rock after everybody else is dead and all of your weapons are exhausted, but I'm getting way ahead of myself here.