So, I asked my son, an NCO in the Marine Corps with two grueling combat deployments to Iraq under his belt, the following question:

How many moms do you know who would spring up from a sound sleep, grab the shotgun, load it, go outside in the dark, and blow the head off a rattlesnake stretched out on the front porch, throw the snake into the pasture, pet the dogs, and go back to sleep?

Not many, I dare say.  A few rancher-types, no doubt, because this is the life we face, but by and large, not many.

Some people may wonder where Marines get their guts.  They seem to think that these men and women spring forth, fully formed, from the heads of their drill instructors.

I beg to differ.

Others think they come from hardy veteran-dads who led them into the military tradition, and while some may come from military families, all right, as mine did, I would like to counter that sexist argument (after all, there are plenty of gutsy female Marines out there too)--by saying that DNA covers both sides of the double-helix, and some Marine mamas are pretty tough broads in their own rights, thank you very much.

My son grew up in the wilds of west Texas, waaay out in the boonies, surrounded by animals and horses, and he knew real cowboys--the kind you don't see much anymore--as opposed to the dime-store or rodeo variety.  Quiet men with a mischievous sense of humor and a strength that runs deep, but each and every one of them was married to a woman who could literally round up cattle in the morning and cook steaks in the evening.

Both my husband and I are conservationists, and we believe that all wildlife serves its purpose on this planet, so we don't usually kill snakes--not even rattlesnakes--if they are out in their regular environment.

Front porches don't count as such, however, not when you have pets and, as we've had in the past, children around.  Our country dogs, shepherd-mixes named Bart and Maggie (after their T.V. counterparts), sleep on our front porch and we keep dry dog food out for them there.

Bart is the old-timer--15 years old.  He's in charge of ranch security, but he's growing hard of hearing, and when we realized that he was getting embarrassed by missing stuff he should have caught, we got him Maggie as a little sister-playmate, to be his eyes and ears.  She's a year old now, in training to take over for him.

They bark at coyotes and wild hogs (a recent nuisance) and just about anything else that breaches ranch parameters near the house.  I once watched Maggie chase a coyote like a speeding bullet straight across a pasture, and when he ran under the fence, she came to a screeching halt back on her haunches like a cutting horse, turned around, and trotted back to the house.

But Bart has a special bark he reserves for rattlesnakes that come up too close.  It's a high-pitched, insistent bark that sounds an alarm that is unmistakeable.  And that's what woke me up at one a.m.  I stumbled through the house, snapped on the porch light, swung open the screen door--WOOPS!  There he was! 

Stretched out right under the door.  Next to Bart's bed, which was the real insult.

Which meant I had to load up the shotgun, go out the back door and tromp around the side of the house in the windy wild star-spangled dark, and keep the excited dogs back, and take aim--all while still half-asleep.

Husband was, of course, out of town.

When you live in the country and it's one o'clock in the  morning and there's a rattlesnake crawling up under your 15-year old beloved dog's bed, you don't worry about trifles like whether or not you will blow a hole in the wooden wall behind.

You just blow its little head off, then traipse back around to dig out the shovel, and shoo the dogs back, and scoop the thing up, and struggle out through tall grass that you hope isn't hiding a cousin to it, and toss it over the fence into the pasture, then pet pet pet the dogs and tell them how brave and wise they were to wake you up in the middle of the night because otherwise you'd have shuffled out there in the morning wearing flip-flops carrying a bowl of dog food and likely stepped right on the thing.

Which would not be good.

Then you lean the shotgun back into the corner where it stays, unloaded, and you put the shells back in the box that you did not need because if you can't blow the head off a rattlesnake with a .410 at the distance of six feet you ought not be handling a firearm in the first place, and you turn out the lights and crawl back in bed and conk right out.

And that, boys and girls, is where Marines come from.