cuddle buddy chain. Two guys would hold each other chest to chest, like mama and baby otters do, then we’d sit back to back with another pair of guys to limit the amount of surface area exposed to the air. I’ve never even hugged my own father with this much feeling, let alone someone I’ve known for less than a month, but I held on to the dude facing me like he was Hillary Clinton’s emails—I was never letting go.
After a few minutes, the cuddle-buddy chain started working. Then I had to piss. Bad. You forget about things like bodily functions when you’ve been operating on adrenaline and no sleep for multiple days in a row. It’s only when you taste that first tiny morsel of comfort and relaxation that the urge to empty out rushes to the front of your mind. And when it comes, it comes with the fury of a flash flood. When I started to disengage from my cuddle buddy, a southern gentleman named Bishop, he grabbed ahold of my shirt and pulled me back into him.
“Don’t go,” he said.
“I have to piss,” I told him, trying to get him to unlatch.
“I don’t fucking care,” he said through shivering teeth, grabbing on tighter.
“Dude.”
“Just piss right here.” The desperation in his eyes was palpable. “Please, man, I need you.”
“It’s gonna get all over you.”
“Good.”
“What do you mean, ‘good’?!”
“I want you to fucking piss on me.” He nodded weakly, before letting out one last breath that I could see dissipate into the Georgia night sky. “It’ll be warm.”
I looked into Bishop’s eyes again. In that brief moment something had changed in him. All the insecurity we try to hide when we’re young, all the macho posturing around sex and homosexuality and masculinity, it was all melting away for Bishop right in front of me. Any bit of shame or modesty or boundaries he had before this night, that was all gone. And that was the whole point of the exercise. To shed whatever bullshit defenses we had brought with us in order to work together in the common defense and get the job done.
“Dude, that’s kind of gay,” I said. (Clearly, I still had some work to do.)
“It’s not gay if it’s cold.” Even through chattering teeth, Bishop responded with such conviction that it sounded like he’d thought about this for a while (and maybe even consulted with his pastor just to be sure). The reality is, in the early stages of freezing your balls off, the minutes pass like hours, and you have a lot of time to think. That gave Bishop more than enough time to rationalize the decision to turn himself into a human toilet.
“Do it right now, motherfucker. We need this for warmth.”
The urgency in his voice was unnerving. I looked into his eyes one last time, probing for some kind of indication that maybe he was fucking around. Then I looked inside myself and realized what Bishop already knew. When you enlist in the United States Army, intent on joining one of the three battalions of the 75th Ranger Regiment, what you are really signing up for is a commitment to do whatever it takes, whenever and wherever it is asked of you. The men you will be fighting with are your brothers, and when they need you, you need to be there, no matter the cost, no matter the sacrifice. This guy might one day die in my arms, I realized. The least I could do was piss into his.
Against every instinct in my body, I accepted the situation for what it was and pissed on another man. This was no ordinary piss, either. This was like a Bruce Springsteen concert. It just kept going and going, and all I could do was sit there in awe, waiting and wondering, Will this ever end?!?
But I’ll be goddamned if Bishop wasn’t right. As I began to feel the trickle of regret fill my already-soaked camo bottoms, regret quickly turned into relief, in the form of 98.6-degree yellow liquid. This was the warmest either of us had been all week. If I had known earlier, I would have pissed myself every chance I had. I wouldn’t even have bothered to pull my dick out of my pants all week, now that I think about it.
In the end, our cuddle chain never broke. We survived the rugged, fissured butthole that is Cole Range by clinging to each other like the dingleberries we were.