by Si Robertson
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PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1: Birthday Suit
CHAPTER 2: Dynamic Dog Duo
CHAPTER 3: Redneck Pets
CHAPTER 4: Book Report
CHAPTER 5: Unidentified Walking Object
CHAPTER 6: Snake Bit
CHAPTER 7: Floating Log
CHAPTER 8: Dancing with Wolves
CHAPTER 9: Bumblebees
CHAPTER 10: Kamikaze Pilot
CHAPTER 11: C Is Always the Best Answer
CHAPTER 12: Big Oaf
CHAPTER 13: Passing the Test
CHAPTER 14: Good Morning, Vietnam!
CHAPTER 15: Deuce and a Half
CHAPTER 16: Guard Duty
CHAPTER 17: Leave It to Beavers
CHAPTER 18: Black Market
CHAPTER 19: Iced Tea Glass
CHAPTER 20: The Woman of My Dreams
CHAPTER 21: Newlyweds
CHAPTER 22: God’s Blessing
CHAPTER 23: Trasa
CHAPTER 24: Like Father, Like Son
CHAPTER 25: Sleepwalking
CHAPTER 26: Mass Murder
CHAPTER 27: Semiretirement
CHAPTER 28: Homecoming
CHAPTER 29: Broken Heart
CHAPTER 30: Faith
AFTERWORD: Letters to Si from His Family
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT SI ROBERTSON
“You can’t spell squirrel without Si, and that’s me!”
MY PARENTS ABSOLUTELY RUINED me. One of the lessons they always preached was to tell the truth no matter what. The Bible says we should always be honest, and that’s one of the virtues I’ve tried to live by. I grew up to be an honest man who always told the truth to my teachers, coaches, sergeants, and bosses. Hey, I was like George Washington—I could never tell a lie! I can’t even cross my fingers behind my back, Jack!
I believe lying is a learned skill. Some people are good at it, while others aren’t. I’ve always been a lousy liar. The key to being a good liar is to know when you can get away with it and when you can’t. You have to keep a straight face if you’re going to lie, and I could never stop smiling when I tried. My palms would get sweaty, and I’d lose my composure and start to stutter. Hey, I even grew a long beard so people couldn’t call me a bald-faced liar. Still, as much as I tried, I couldn’t tell a lie!
My older brother Phil always told me that my nose would grow longer than Pinocchio’s if I was ever dishonest, and I figured my nose was already big enough. Some people are great at lying. Poker players are great liars, and most politicians will never get elected if they can’t lie. Hey, how do you know if a politician is lying? His lips are moving! Some great Americans were undone by not telling the truth: Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Lance Armstrong, Mark McGwire, the guys from Milli Vanilli, and Pete Rose, to name a few. I don’t want to end up like them, so I always tell the truth. Hey, do you know what happens to a liar when he dies? He lies still, Jack!
My twenty-four years in the army would have been much easier if I’d told only a couple of white lies. I got myself into so much trouble in the military by simply telling the truth. I was passed over for promotions and given crummy assignments because I was always honest. If I’d told a few little lies, I might have left the army as a four-star general!
Well, I’m always honest, so I have to tell you about the time I tried to tell a lie while I was in the army. Hey, even the best of us slip up every once in a while! During my first year in Vietnam, I actually tried to lie to my commanding officer. I was extremely homesick and was desperately trying to get a furlough back to the United States. One day, I walked into my sergeant’s tent.
“Sir, might I have a word with you?” I asked very politely.
“What is it, Private Robertson?” he said.
“Well, sir, my wife is extremely ill and the doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong with her,” I said. “I really need to fly back to Louisiana to check on her. I think she might die.”
“Robertson, I have some good news for you,” he said. “We received a telegram this morning from your wife, and she’s been released from the hospital. Everything’s going to be fine. There’s no reason for you to go home.”
I scratched my head in disbelief.
“Sir, with all due respect, I have to tell you that we must be the two biggest liars in Vietnam,” I said. “I don’t even have a wife!”
Hey, if I’ve learned anything from being a part of Duck Dynasty it’s that you can’t believe everything you see or read. It always amazes me that if people see something on TV or read it on the Internet, they instantly believe it’s true.
I remember going to church on a Sunday morning not long ago, and a little old lady walked up to me before the service started.
“Si, I’m so sorry about your vision,” she said.
“Hey, what are you talking about?” I said. “My vision is perfect. It’s forty/twenty!”
“No, you’re blind, honey,” she said. “I saw it on TV. It was on Duck Dynasty.”
Hey, no matter what I told the lady, she thought I was blind! She even asked me if I needed to be escorted to a pew!
When Phil and I were making an appearance last summer, a pretty lady walked up to our table and said, “Here I am.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m the lady that just drove three hundred and fifty miles to marry you,” she said. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
“Well . . . that’s an interesting proposal, but there’s someone I know who might object.”
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“Hey, I’m sorry, darlin’,” I said, “but I’ve been happily married for more than forty years. I don’t think my wife would like it if I got hitched to you, too.”
“You mean I drove all this way for nothing?” she said. “Would you at least sign these T-shirts?”
Hey, you wouldn’t believe the number of marriage proposals I get every week. Women send me letters, cards, e-mails, flowers, razors, and candy. For some reason, the women across America think I’m an eligible bachelor. Hey, sorry, ladies, I’ve been married since 1971!
It amazes me what people will say about you sometimes. A few months ago, the phone started ringing at my house one afternoon. All of my relatives and friends started calling me to make sure I wasn’t dead! People were even calling Phil’s house to make sure I was okay. Apparently, someone had advertised that I would be appearing at a festival in Louisiana. When a bunch of people showed up to see me and I wasn’t there, one of the vendors at the festival told them that I’d been killed in a car wreck! Naturally, everybody thought I was dead. The news of my tragic demise spread like wildfire across the Internet! Hey, news flash, people: I’m still here!
As you read this book, there are a few things that you have to understand: 95 percent of my stories are truthful. Every member of the Robertson family has the God-given gift of storytelling. Hey, when you’ve sat in a duck blind for more than half of your life, you have to figure out some way to pass the time! It’s better than looking at Willie and Jase for six hours! Many of the stories I like to tell happened when I was a young boy or when I was in Vietnam. My family members shared some of the stories over the dinner table, and other soldiers in Vietnam passed some of them
on to me. At my age, a few of the details are cloudy, but I’ll recollect the coming stories as best I can. Hey, just remember it isn’t a lie if you think it’s true! It’s up to you, the reader, to figure out what’s true and what’s fiction. Best of luck with that, Jack! May the force be with you.
Hey, another thing you have to know: my stories are kind of like my vocabulary. You might have noticed I like to say “hey” quite a bit. “Hey” can mean anything. It can mean “yes,” it can mean “maybe,” and it can mean “no.” Hey, it could mean “next week.” The bottom line is, you have to understand “hey” to understand me.
And if you know anything about Silas Merritt Robertson, you know I’m a hard rascal to figure out.
“The naked truth is much better than the best-dressed lie.”
Birthday Suit
LIKE EVERY OTHER HUMAN on earth, I came into this world in the buff. According to my brothers and sisters, I stayed that way throughout much of my early childhood. For whatever reason, I never liked to wear clothes when I was a boy, so I ran around our farm buck nekkid. I guess I figured since God brought me into this world in my birthday suit, I might as well wear it. Hey, some people have it, and some people don’t. I’ve always had it, Jack!
When I was born on April 27, 1948, my parents, Merritt and James Robertson, were living in a log cabin outside of Vivian, Louisiana. The cabin was really rustic; we used an outhouse and didn’t even have hot water to take baths. I was the youngest of five sons: Jimmy Frank was the oldest boy, followed by Harold, Tommy, and Phil. I had an older sister, Judy, and then my younger sister, Jan, came along a few years after I was born.
Our log cabin sat on top of a hill and was surrounded by about four hundred acres. Marvin and Irene Hobbs, Momma’s brother-in-law and sister, lived at the bottom of the hill. They had several kids: Billy, Mack, Sally, and Darrell, who were our first cousins. When Momma and Daddy played dominoes at the Hobbses’ house, Jimmy Frank was put in charge of the younger kids. Our cabin became a prison, and Jimmy Frank was the warden. He’d walk outside the cabin, as if on patrol, making sure none of the younger kids escaped, so we always called him the warden! We younger kids wanted to go to the Hobbses’ house to play with our cousins, but Jimmy Frank was under strict orders to keep us inside.
There were only two windows in the cabin, and they were our routes of escape. As the warden marched around the log cabin, one of us captives would watch him through the cracks in the walls. When he made his way around the right corner of the house, we’d all jump through the window and run down to the Hobbses’ place. At least there weren’t any sirens when we made our getaway!
My daddy started working in the oil industry when he was young, first as a roughneck, then as a driller and tool pusher, and eventually he became a drilling superintendent. It was really hard work, but I never heard him complain about it. It was an honest living, and even though we never had a lot of money, we always had enough food to eat, which mostly came from the fields and gardens on our farm. And with so many kids around, we were never bored and always seemed to find something to keep us busy.
When I was a little bit older, we left the log cabin and moved to Dixie, Louisiana, which is about fourteen miles north of Shreveport. We made the move because Momma suffered a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed as manic-depressive. Living in Dixie made it easier for her to get the treatment she needed; she spent a lot of time in hospitals and the state mental institution. I loved my momma dearly, and my brothers and sisters always say I was her favorite child. Hey, what can I say? I’ve always had that effect on women!
A lot of my fondest childhood memories occurred in Dixie. I can still remember the day we drove to our house for the first time. We unloaded out of a 1957 Chevrolet and a couple of kids from the neighborhood walked up. We introduced ourselves to the boys, and the only way I can describe them is, well, they were geeks. We wandered around the yard, exploring the place, and noticed a big patch of woods about two miles from the railroad tracks in front of our house. We asked the boys, “Hey, what’s over there?”
“We have no idea,” they told us.
“What do you mean you have no idea?” I asked them. “Have you not been over there?”
“No, we’ve never been over there,” one of them said.
The next thing they knew, Tommy, Phil, and I were racing across the railroad tracks and into the woods. We drove the farmers around our house slap insane by hunting on their land without permission. One of the farmers loved to chase us out of the woods in his pickup truck. Every time we heard his pickup coming, we’d take off running like deer through the woods. We hid behind logs and in underbrush, looking for his truck at the top of a hill or in the pecan orchard. It was like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner. He never did catch us.
Years later, we found out that chasing us was one of the farmer’s favorite things to do. Momma sold Avon cosmetics for a while, and one day she was at the farmer’s house selling products to his wife. Momma apologized to the farmer for our hunting on his land, but he told her we were allowed to hunt on any of his property. Momma thanked him and was getting ready to walk out the door.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “Don’t tell them.”
“Well, you gave them permission,” she said.
“Oh, yeah, they can hunt on all of my land whenever they want,” he said. “But don’t tell them I gave them permission. If they know they have my permission, they won’t run from me.”
That farmer loved the chase. We ran from him for about fifteen years and didn’t even have to!
Phil, Tommy, and I were always hunting or fishing. One of the best things we did happened when the sun went down. When Phil was ten years old, he got an air rifle for Christmas. I was eight and got a Daisy BB gun. We spent every day going around the neighborhood, shooting anything we could kill. When the sun went down, we got our flashlights and shined them under the awnings over the windows of our neighbors’ houses. Birds loved to fly up there and go to sleep. Guess what? We loved to shine our flashlights on the birds and shoot them! Every night, our neighbors would be awakened by the clank! clank! clank! sounds.
Imagine their surprise when they opened the curtains and saw a bare-bottomed gunman!
“I like a dog that fits my personality: well-groomed, handsome, a natural-born killer, and one that doesn’t mind taking a nap once in a while.”
Dynamic Dog Duo
MARK TWAIN ONCE SAID the difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives. Hey, let me tell you something: where I grew up, cats didn’t have nine lives—they generally had just one! There weren’t many second chances when the Robertsons were involved!
We always had a lot of animals around our house, whether it was chickens, cows, pigs, rabbits, or horses, but I had two favorite family pets. Maimey was a Wiedemeyer—or a Weimaraner as they call them—and she was a good hunting dog. Bullet was a cur, a Louisiana Catahoula leopard dog, which is a fancy way of saying she was a mutt. The breed is actually named after Catahoula Parish on the Ouachita River, which runs in front of the house where Phil and Kay live today.
The Catahoulas are believed to be the first dogs bred in North America; some people even suspect that Native Americans bred their dogs with the molossers and greyhounds that Hernando de Soto brought to Louisiana in the sixteenth century. Curs really aren’t true hounds, but they’re great hunting dogs and terrific at tracking wild boar. Many of them have spotted coats, and nearly all of them have distinctive marbled glass eyes. Bullet had one glass eye and a black and yellow coat. We always knew our toast was perfect when it was the color of Bullet’s coat.
I remember the day Bullet died. A truck hit him on the road in front of our house. Phil and I saw it and were crying as we climbed onto the school bus. By the time we got to school, everybody on the bus was crying and then everybody in our class was crying. All the kids knew Bullet because they were always hanging out at our house.
Maimey was a much bigger dog than Bullet and
had a slick silver coat. Now, one of the problems with the Weimaraner breed is that the dogs are typically stubborn and not very smart. But Maimey was quite the exception. Not only would she listen to our commands, she would even talk to us on occasion!
In fact, Maimey was Momma’s alarm clock when we were young. Every morning, Momma would wake up early to cook us breakfast before we left for school. While Momma was cooking eggs, bacon, and buttermilk biscuits, she talked to our dogs.
“How are you this morning?” she would ask them. “Are you having a good day?”
Even though none of us believed her, Momma insisted the dogs talked back to her.
When it was time for us to wake up for breakfast, Momma would send Maimey to our room.
“Okay, wake them up,” Momma told her.
Maimey liked to leap into our beds and put her cold, wet nose on our faces to wake us. Once she received Momma’s command, she’d take off running around the corner in the kitchen and then sprint down the long hall to our beds. Most of the time, we heard Maimey’s claws scratching the hardwood floors before she jumped on our beds. This was our fair warning to pull the quilts over our heads. Our house was always cold in the winter—there were only a few floor heaters scattered through the shotgun house—and Maimey’s nose was ice-cold after being outside. Once Maimey found an opening in the blankets, she’d root her way under them and there we were—jumping out of bed!
It was impossible to keep Maimey out of the house. When we tried to put her outside, she’d open the front door. I guess she learned to open it by watching us turn the doorknob; she finally realized she could do it with her paws. When Maimey was ready to come inside, we’d hear scratching on the doorknob and then she’d waltz into the front room!
By the time we moved from the log cabin to our house in Dixie, Louisiana, Jimmy Frank and Harold were in school at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. One night, Tommy, Phil, and I were sitting at the dinner table with Pa and Granny (that’s what we called my parents after their first grandchildren were born). It was one of the rare occasions when Maimey was outside.
