The good old days always seemed better in distant memory than they had actually been at the time. - Steve Perry

Gunny squatted to look at the dead creature. “Looks like a rat snake,” she said. “It’s harmless, not poisonous.”
Gramps said, “I don’t care. I don’t like snakes. I don’t like poisonous snakes; I don’t like nonpoisonous snakes; I don’t like sticks on the ground that look like snakes.”
“Ah think maybe somebody had a traumatic event with snakes along the way. What, you had a run-in with the serpent that bedeviled Eve back in the Garden?”
Singh raised an eyebrow.
“A Jewish/Christian story,” Jo said. “The reason mankind lost direct contact with God and was banished from Paradise. A snake talked the first woman into trying fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, after God had warned them not to eat it.”
“Sah, I understand this god is supposedly much more powerful than our gods. I wonder, if he created all things and was all-knowing and omnipotent, why would he put such a tree there? Would he not know in advance that Eve would succumb to the temptation?”
“The tale doesn’t bear too close an inspection,” Gramps said. “Believers view these stories as allegories, metaphors, rather than as literal happenings.”
Gunny jumped in quickly to amend Gramps’s response: “Some of ’em,” she said. “Some of ’em are literalists, and crazy as space-station roaches when the hatch opens to blow them into vac. They think the Earth is six thousand years old and that every word of the Bible is absolutely true. You can have a field day pointing out inconsistencies in those stories, doesn’t bother them, just bounces right off their self-righteous armor.”

Confounders aren't allowed in holding cells, Envoy—"
"And if snakes had legs, they'd be lizards," Massey said. "Let's not discuss things that don't apply to our situation, Lojtnant.

Jo’s desire was to take a long, hot shower when she got back to the base. The crawlers had outdoor showerheads, but the noodle-pinching hardware designers had been given keep-it-cheap design orders, and had apparently achieved them. Crawler showers came with absolutely unalterable timers that gave you a maximum two minutes of piss-poor pressure before they shut off; then they made you wait two more minutes before they would restart. Standing there wet and soapy waiting for more slow-flow rinse water was not the most soothing experience when you were scrubbing mud and blood off yourself.
More than a few soldiers over the years must have entertained the fantasy of hunting down the people who came up with shower timers and murdering them. Or at least dipping them in a latrine trench, then restricting them to a crawler shower to wash it off...