Don't You Know I'm Loco?

There's a better prank, but this is the quicker story, so I'm writing this one while I have a short time window.  Reveille happened every morning before breakfast.  All troops would line up in a big semi-circle around the lawn in front of the dining hall.  The lawn was slightly sloped, green and grassy, and if the morning sun was out it could be quite beautiful.  The head of Buckskin (the camp where this occurred - there were three camps on the Read reservation) would call out the number of each troop and the senior patrol leader of that troop would reply, "All present and accounted for, sir!"  This went with each troop until they all had responded; incidentally no troop ever reported any scout missing, but still.... tradition.  A staff member would then yell out, "Salute!" and someone in the Bucksin office would press play on a tape player connected to a PA system.  Reveille would blast out while all scouts saluted and the flag was raised.  Troops would then be dismissed to the dining hall for breakfast.  Usually.

The Buckskin office was a small building split in two halves, a staff lounge and a sort of business like area where the reveille stereo was and I'm sure some other type of business occurred, though I couldn't tell you what it was.  The office side was locked while the lounge was always open.  The two halves were connected by a locked door, but the wall between the two sides didn't go all the way up to the ceiling.  Don't ask.  One afternoon when nobody was about, a few of us entered the lounge and while most of us acted as lookouts one lithe youngster scaled the wall and dropped into the office.  He ejected the reveille tape (apparently nothing else was played on that stereo) and jumped back over the wall.  Those of you who are young and reading this may not know about recording music from a source (record, CD, radio) onto a tape, but that's what we used to do.  So into town we went to find the same exact blank tape, which we amazingly were able to do given the scarcity of stores, and then back to our camp, Summit.  We then recorded Insane in the Membrane by Cypress Hill onto the new blank.  We took one of those little stickers that came with blank cassettes, wrote reveille on it in the best approximation of the original handwriting we could find, and stuck it to the cassette.  Last step of the operation was to place the new cassette in the stereo.  We accomplished this in much the same way as before and then waited until morning.

All the troops were lined up, present and accounted for of course, everyone saluted the flag, the signal was sent to the office to play reveille and instead of the short sharp tones of a bugle, one of the catchiest most memorable mid 90's hip-hop bass line you could imagine blasted out following B-Real's rhetorical question, "Don't You Know I'm Loco?"

Good times.