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Green Jacket versus Green Beret

© Russell G. Bell

By now everyone is, or should be, aware of Tiger spending four days practicing at being in the Army Special Forces. His dad was Special Forces and must have told Tiger a lot of War stories when he was a small child, as this was the driving force in Tiger's desire to experience the reality of the training.

Any of us who has been in the service knows that four days is not enough time to get into the whole brain-washing routine the Armed Forces does on the recruits. They, of course, train you to blindly follow orders at the blink of an eye while expecting you to still know the difference between right and wrong. Getting up at four a.m. in the morning and running for 5 miles may make Tiger think that he is experiencing the real thing, but he has not had to endure the umpteen weeks of boot camp that came before the many weeks of Special Forces training. He made two jumps out of an airplane where he was tethered to a specialist in parachuting. They should have taken him up and kicked him in the butt just like what would have happened to any other trooper who hesitated at the door, and I have to believe he would have hesitated. Wouldn't you hesitate, as the millions in future earnings and a beautiful blond fiancée waiting at home flashed before your not-yet-thirty-year-old eyes? Now that he has made two jumps he should take a page out of the WWF play book and jump from the Snoopy Two blimp, and land on the first tee just in time to hear his name being announced. I would pay to see that one!

On the firing range he discovered he is left-eye dominate and this should be a big help to him in seeing the break better when lining up a putt. How much better can he get? It's finding the fairways where he has a problem; maybe he should have showed up the week they were doing orienteering! I was an Army brat, and as such we usually lived in post housing and had access to most of the Army Post. There were off-limit areas such as the firing range and the mortar range, but one of the training areas we did have access to was the P.T. course. I was about twelve years old when I first started running the P.T. course. At twelve I had the muscle mass of a typical twelve-year-old child. I only refer to myself as a 100-pound weakling to make the point that I could complete the course at 12, and beat the best time the Army was offering up when I was 16 years old. Of course I did not have a First Sergeant razzing me and making my life miserable while climbing, swinging, balancing and doing hand-over-hand maneuvers.

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