As a kid I spilled some Testors red bottled paint onto our gold shag carpet. (Hey, it was the seventies - we had avocado appliances too) I cut a square out of carpet thsat contained the red paint, and then moved my bunk bed a little - then cut an identical square fron the impression where the foot board had been on the carpet. I swapped them out. No one was ever the wiser. I think even after we moved everyone was too busy to notice.
Fast forward about eight years:
Staff Sergeant Peoples, one of our Airborne Tacs in 43rd Company, Airborne School, Fort Benning:
“Any one of ya’ll can draw? Speak up! Who think they an art-eest out heah?” (He pronounced his name Peebles by the way)
It was zero week. I already knew what the day’s activities would involve - picking pine needles out of gravel by hand, raking said gravel, and other character building tasks under the August Georgia sun.
“I can, Sergeant Airbonre!” I yelled.
“Good, then grab two o’ yo buddies, and report to the mess hall.”
There we spent the next several days, indoors, painting murals, unit crests and what not on the walls of the mess hall. And eating all the soft ice cream we wanted. There was one bigger than life mural I did on one wall I copied possibly from a Time magazine cover - it showed three Airborne soldiers, all with different weapons - an M60, an M16, and an M203. I changed it to make their berets green, maroon, and black. But I was not good at doing eyes, so I put large black sunglasses on all three of them. That did not go over well with SSG Peebles, at least outwardly. Ultimately the sunglasses stayed. But that black paint somehow got tipped over on the dark red carpet. whichever one of us did it righted the can soon enough to prevent a total career ending catastgrophe, but there was still a nice big spot of black paint on the carpet over a foot in diameter.
Thinking back to my youth, I quickly devised a plan to save our collective asses and keep the soft ice cream flowing: We moved a table that had a large square base, and you guessed it - we cut out a large square of carpet, and transferred it to where the spill was and cut that piece out. One slight problem - the grain in the piece we stuck into the square we cut out (it was not a perfect square) was running 90 degrees to the original carpet. We were running out of time as they were about to serve chow, so we went with it. We never got caught.
I wonder if that mural or any of those crests has survived. Funny how these days no cool guy mural would be complete without large Oakleys on everyone.