"There is an army base in Ft. Benning, Georgia," Ken said.  "Maybe they will have a hostess house where we can crash."  They didn't, but they had one room in the men's barracks with two single twin beds.  It was midnight.  We took it.  Ken and Scott slept head to toe in one bed and I sandwiched in between the two girls in the other one.  There was a twenty stall urinal connecting out one of the doors to our room.  None of us cared.  We were exhausted.

When we left Beaufort, Pat had a cat that she had adopted that day.  Scraggly. Woe-be-gone.  Pitiful. She begged her dad to let it go with us.  "No way," he said.  "No animals.  Especially a cat."  But he relented when she began to cry.  "Okay, you can bring the cat, but you are responsible to take care of it."  She assured him that she would. 

Somewhere between all of us in the two twin beds, the cat found a place to curl up--until six in the morning when it began to meow to get out.  So Pat slipped outside in her underwear, (all of our pajamas were long gone on the moving van) to let the cat out.  And of course, the cat crawled under the barracks and wouldn't come out.  Pat ran back in, woke Becky up and the two of them tried every trick they knew to get the cat out from under the barracks.  No luck.  By the time they gave up and Pat began to cry, we were all awake and Ken put on his Dress Blues and crawled under the barracks, got the cat, and crawled out--as a platoon of soldiers marched by in lock step.

Every one of those men saluted the Marine Lt. Col. who was lying flat on his stomach (in full Marine dress blue uniform), crawling out from under the barracks with a bedraggled cat in his arms--whose family were standing around watching--in their underwear.  Ken stood up, returned the salute, handed the cat to Pat and brushed off as much of the mud on his beautiful blue uniform that he could.  "You hold on that cat," he told her.  "I'm never going to rescue it again.  Ever."

True story.  You can't make this stuff up.