Live Fire with Chuck Holton

Mr. Holton,

G Smith

Get your own signed copy of this book now by clicking the button below. It sells for list price ($11.99 US) and shipping is free!

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Chuck Holton
13236 Executive Park Terrace
Germantown, MD 20874

Now it’s time for another tale from the annals of the Holton Homestead.

So far, our endeavors to raise some goats aren’t going quite as planned this year.
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Chuck appears on At Home Live! with Chuck & Jenni Borsellino September 15th. At Home is a morning show with an emphasis on the family.

Click Here to find how you can tune in and watch the show!

Here’s another of the many emails I’m recieving from folks who have read “A More Elite Soldier.”

Dear Mr. Holton,

Thank you for writing “A More Elite Soldier.” I have no immediate family who has served in the military, excluding my dad who served in WWII out of necessity, but I have a 14-year-old son, Richard, who passionately lives to be in the Rangers in a few years. Being Christians, we’ve had a difficult time finding suitable reading material to feed this interest until we discovered your article about Jeff Strueker in Focus on the Family’s Breakaway magazine, and now this book. We’ve each read the book twice now, and I am able to reference it constantly to motivate my strong-willed, fiercely patriotic, but undisciplined son in so many ways. He still draws soldiers and weapons all over his schoolwork, but at least he’s getting his work done quicker, and he has a vision to do well in high school, since a former Ranger has related how important it is to tend to the task at hand. The article in Breakaway provided a pleasing Christian angle to “Black Hawk Down,” which I read aloud twice, and censored with his full knowledge, over a period of weeks as he washed dishes. We look forward to more articles and books from you.

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Every year I lead a group of youth from our church on a weekend outing we call the “Extreme Weekend.” In three days we go white water rafting, rappelling, caving, orienteering and we sleep in the woods for two nights without tents or sleeping bags.

Two years ago, for some strange reason, almost all of the group that went were girls. This made for a totally different trip than I am used to…

Usually, we have mostly guys. Guys act very differently in the woods than girls do. Girls are, well…wierd.

Dinner the first night consisted of hot dogs and chicken nuggets to be cooked over the campfire. As I set out the food, I was making mental calculations and I realized that I hadn’t brought enough for the 16 people in our group. I started to sweat, imagining myself hanging upside-down from one of the nearby trees while the girls put my hair into cornrows or gave me henna tattoos or something. Yikes!

Anyway, I watched carefully as the group started eating, and it didn’t take me long to realize that I had brought more than enough. The girls weren’t eating a third of what a comparable group of boys would have eaten. I started hearing things like “I can’t finish the rest of this cookie!” (Huh?) or “Anyone want to split a chicken nugget?” (The silly thing is the size of a potato chip, for pete’s sake!) Little did I know this was just the beginning of a very strange weekend in the woods.

When it came time to bed down for the night, I started hearing things like “Anyone else need to use the porta-potty?” (Ok, now that’s just wrong!) I went around to make sure everyone had adequate bedding (ferns and an emergency blanket) and found that most of the girls planned to employ the “pile theory” of warmth retention during the night. That is, they all planned to sleep stacked up like cordwood.

Now there’s something you’d NEVER catch guys doing. I’d freeze to death before I’d cuddle up with seven other stinky guys. One of the other chaperones came over and threw his emergency blanket on the ground about six feet from mine. I eyed him suspiciously. “You’re a little close there, sugar pants” I scolded. He had apparently forgotten the unwritten rule among men camping in the woods that there must be at least eight feet of separation between me and anyone else with smelly feet at all times while sleeping.

Maybe it’s because women don’t snore like some men I know. Even if sleeping in a pile meant I’d be nice and cozy it wouldn’t help if I was kept awake all night by some bozo snoring in my ear. (funny, my wife has made similar comments from time to time. Hmmm….)

Another strange occurrence was the change in the girls as they got hungrier. (Planned into the trip, just to make things interesting is that they only get one meal on friday)

By Friday night they were mostly out of food. One of the girls had insisted that she was a vegetarian, however, when I caught a pot full of Crayfish out of the creek and cooked them over the fire, she started looking wistfully at the pot, and saying things like, “Well Crawfish isn’t really meat”. I had spent two hours collecting crawfish on the premise that it would get an “EEEEEWWWW!!” out of the girls and I could enjoy my meal in peace. However, when the lid came off the pot, and the crawfish looked suddenly like miniature lobsters, they disappeared with a WHOOSH! , and I ended up getting to eat exactly one of them, and not a big one at that!

I guess hunger will make a girl do strange things.

I still wonder what happened to all the guys?