Almost thirty years ago, I was in Kentucky keeping the hills safe for tea-baggers. We spent a lot of time out in those cold wet hills, good training they called it.

One gray evening we flew low ( about 500 feet ) over that leafless forest and I saw what must have been a million blackbirds flying in formation below us. They were so thick that you couldn't hardly see between them. It was like a huge, writhing snake about 100 feet wide and several miles long.

But the strangest thing was, from where I was watching ( sitting in a door ) I could see that they were actually flying in a big circle! Like a black snake in the sky that had it's tail in it's mouth. Weird...millions of birds weird.

They flew as if those millions were actually one very large creature with a mind of it's own. Weird and spooky. It crossed my mind in that minute or two that they were all out looking for food before the sun went down. They were hungry, and tired, like us.

I was on a huey, one of about 20 with maybe 6 or 8 of us in each. And we were hungry, and tired, and ready to pack it in. Weird really because about an hour later, we were all dug in around this bald mountain, in the twilight. No fires or shelters. Cold C-rations from a can and a sack to sleep in. And then the birds arrived...by the millions! Weird as hell I tell ya...

They squacked for a while, and I don't know for how long because I drifted off, sitting up against a big, leafless tree that was dripping wet, the ground was wet, my sack was wet and cold and it really sucked so bad that I just drifted off...

And woke to a grey sky, and silence...weird silence. We six ( b-team, 1st squad, recon ) woke up in the middle of a dead zone. Dead blackbirds lay all around us. They covered the ground around and under that old tree so thick that you couldn't hardly walk without kicking one of them. Cold, lifeless feathers. Black birds under a grey wet winter sky in Kentucky.

We got the hell out of there as fast as our wet boots would carry us. That was just to damn weird. And I kid you not, I still think they starved to death. There just wasn't anything alive out there that winter to eat.