Radcliff is a small town in Kentucky just outside of Fort Knox. It is populated by about 21,000 hillbillies and local yokels. About the only thing that Radcliff is known for, despite the fact that it lies in a dry county, is hosting the worst drunk driving accident in United States history, where a drunk driver apparently used an off-ramp as an on-ramp sending him the wrong way down a local interstate. He ended up in a head-on collision with the bus of the local First Assembly of God Youth group, which erupted in a fire, killing 27 people.
Little known to the local residents of Radcliff, however, lurks the mysterious tale of the Radcliff Monster. The following account is a true story of my encounter with such.
It was the middle of December and quite cold outside most of the time. We had reached week 12, the last stretch of our 16 week Basic Training and just one week away from heading home for the Christmas. We couldn’t have been more thrilled.
The task for the week was to learn map reading and land navigation skills. If there is one thing I am good at, its reading a map. So I knew this week would blow by fast and I’d shortly be home eating junk food and drinking Coke. Oh, what I wouldn’t have given for a Coke. We spent several days in long classes learning about ridges and draws, and saddles and depressions. All wonderful map reading terms, referring to different land features as they are depicted on a map. I won’t get into details on them because apparently it took a week’s worth of classes to get us to learn them all.
Thursday was the last full day for us that week, since the next day we were all boarding planes to go home for a week. They had something fun an exciting planned for us that day. We would go to a local state forest, often used for military training, and execute a land navigation course. The setting is miles and miles of woods in which there are several land markers at given map coordinates that soldiers in turn would go find, given only a map, a compass, and the knowledge of how many paces it takes each soldier to count 1 kilometer (72 paces for me).
This sounded like a fun way to spend the last day of the year in the military. It was a 2 part course. First you would go through the course during the daylight. Then, we would wait for nightfall and go through again, in the dark, with no flashlight mind you.
Drill Sergeant then told us of the alleged Radcliff Monster. He provided us a vague description of a large, menacing beast that occupies the local woods. He also told us, and made it very clear, that under absolutely no circumstance are we to engage the Radcliff Monster should we come in contact with ‘it’. We were also advised not to expose any food in the woods, as this would surely attract the legendary Radcliff Monster.
We brushed it off and figured that if there was anything out there, it had to be a deer or similar and figured that it couldn’t be anything deadly, or surely they wouldn’t send us in there, in the dark, and without a flashlight.
We arrived by Humvees that afternoon and proceeded through the course. We were in squads of 5. It was Williams, Smith, Shepherd, and Jenkins. My squad and I found all of the 50 nav points given to us and made our way to the finish point of the course, where we found the drill sergeants waiting with the Humvees and a fire barrel to keep warm. We all huddled around the fire barrel and awaited nightfall to go through the course again.
As the afternoon went by, other squads would come in and everyone would ask if anyone had seen the Radcliff Monster. Of course no one had and it was now widely believed that the drill sergeants were only attempting to scare us for nightfall.
We didn’t think much more of it. Nightfall came and brought with it about 2-3 inches of snow. Terrific! Not only is it now pitch black and, we without flashlights, but to reduce visibility even more and make us ever more miserable, it’s snowing!
Drill Sergeant drove us back to the start point and told us that we had exactly 3 hours to find 10 of the 50 nav points and get our asses back to the finish point so we could get back to the barracks before too much more snow came. Easy!
We found our first 3 nav points within about the first 30 minutes. Great, we thought! At this rate we would be finished in a little more than an hour and a half - two hours tops! We were moving quickly. About this time, Williams gets “tired” and insists on stopping for a quick break to catch his breath. I’m glad he wanted to take his time out here in the cold and the snow, but the other 4 of us couldn’t get our minds off the warmth of the burn barrel! We argued for a brief moment and then agreed on a short break so he could take a couple sips out of his frozen “canteen, drinking” and get back to the course.
This is where it all went wrong. We sat there for no more than 5 minutes when off in the distance we heard footsteps. Not normal footsteps either, heavy, big footsteps.
“Shh, did you hear that?” said Jenkins peering into the darkness.
“Hear what? I didn’t hear anything.” replied Shepherd.
Williams jokingly and annoyingly offered a suggestion that it’s the monster that Drill Sergeant had warned us about.
“Shut up Williams, Its nothing” Shepherd snapped back.
“I heard something” Jenkins reaffirmed.
The two of them went on for about half a minute when I said to both of them “SHHH! It is something!”
We all fell silent and huddled shoulder to shoulder gazing into the darkness and snowfall. We heard snow crunching. Slowly getting closer and closer.
“Its got to be Drill Sergeant” said Shepherd.
“SHH” I said, and we watched and listened.
It got quiet for a second and then out of no where at what must have been 100 MPH, lunged an 8 foot tall emu making a horrifically loud grunting noise and charging straight for us.
It took 4 of us about a half a blink to realize we needed to get the hell out of there, so we took off running. Williams, which serves him right for getting lazy and making us stop in the first place, did not respond so quickly and was knocked down and trampled as the beast continued its pursuit.
Now, I can’t recall if it actually continued to chase us for more than 10 feet, but I do know that we ran like hell without looking back for about 10 straight minutes. We finally came to a rural road that ran along the west side of the nav course. After doing a head count, we realized Williams wasn’t with us. Fortunately, during the pursuit we did manage to hold onto our gear and our maps. We located where we were and figured out where we needed to go. Then we looked at each other and agreed there was no way in hell we were going to walk back into those woods, not to find the nav points, or Williams for that matter. We saw on the map we were only about 4 kilometers away from the finish point and decided that we would head straight there (along the road of course) and sneak in hopefully about the time everyone else is getting there and not be noticed.
To our dismay, none of us thought about looking at a clock to realize we came in much too early. Drill Sergeant asked us why we weren’t on the course and we had no choice but to tell him what had happened. His first question, after realizing that one of us was missing, was “How the fucks the bird”.
“Good Drill Sergeant, but I don’t know what happened to Williams” I said back to him.
With a somber look, Drill Sergeant told us we had 2 options. We could get back in the woods and find the remaining 7 nav points and rescue Williams, or we could do pushups until everyone else finished and Williams was found. We took a squad vote, and reconfirmed that there was no way in hell we were going back in those woods.
Needless to say we did pushups for about an hour and a half when one of the other squads came in with Williams tagging behind, still out of breath, and with a pretty good sized scratch on his face.
I was happy that this was finally over and we could get back to the barracks for one last night of sleep before we head home for Christmas leave.
The one thought that still ponders through my head about those forsaken woods is “What in the hell is a wild emu doing in the heart of Kentucky!” To this day, I have not met a bird that I trust.
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