By Matt Strother
In what has become a Bradley staff tradition, everyone attempts to kill
everybody else. The game is called "assassins", and it brings some healthy
competition and some not-so-healthy paranoia to the drudgery of our lives.
Everyone puts a clothespin with their name on it into a hat and draws out
someone else's. Then they try to kill the person who's pin they drew by
attaching the clothespin to that person, more or less without them noticing. Your reward
for your job well done is the opportunity to do it again. The killer takes
the killee's pin, and thus has a new target. Eventually, the game
gets down to two people who are going after each other.
This tradition started in 1999, and the first game was perhaps the best there ever
was. The last two were a Handicraft
guy, who is now in the army, and me.
He was big, and scary. And much much better at the game than I was.
He had wrestled a fellow staffer to the ground in the trading post to tag him
earlier in the game, and had walked away as if nothing had happened. In all, he had tagged
eight or nine people. I had only tagged three or four before I'd come up
with his pin. I had been attempting to tag him for several days.
According to some accounts, I should have won already, because I had
gotten him once, but it didn't count. I had tagged him while he was in
his tent, which, though I didn't know at the time, was out of bounds.
During one of our many attempts to kill each other, he knocked my approaching pin (the
one with his name on it) away, and it came apart in my hand. I suppose
that's what I get for running it through my fingers so much. I
did the only thing I could do: RUN AWAY!! My first thought was to head for
the lake; that was my turf, and I could beat him there...or so I thought.
In retrospect, I don't know what I was thinking.
But before I had even made it to the pool (which at the time was not enclosed by a
fence), it became clear that I wasn't going to make it to the lake. He was
bearing down on me, and I hadn't a second to think. So I did what any
sensible Bradley staffer would have done. I plunged, in full
uniform, into the pool.
I took off my belt, shirt, and shoes, and tossed
them up on the side. And my assassin waited on the deck. He said he
could wait all day. I said I could too. Eventually he left. By then I had figured out that I had no
chance of winning the game.
I went to take a shower, and met Ryan along the way. He asked what
had happened. I told him "Well, I got away from him."
After I had changed into my other uniform, my assassin came walking up to me.
Recognizing the inevitable, I knelt down and bowed my head. A staffer
watching moaned "No, don't surrender!" Apparently he wanted more drama,
or maybe he wanted me to win (he had been the one who'd gotten wrestled to the
ground). My assassin walked up, and pinned me on the collar. Thus
ended the first game of assassins at Camp Bradley.
In an ironic twist, at the start of the next game, I drew him and he drew me, but
Bill let us trade.
