Treasure Quest, PTSD and a Sheridan Resort Hotel

For those of you keeping score at home, I had sworn off publishing anything more about Treasure Quest – Snake Island (which has nothing to do with Snake Island this season) but the last episode outraged me. Keith “Cappy” Plaskett had collapsed in the jungle and when the rest of the team reached him and touched him, he began screaming and curling up into a ball. He then said something about Vietnamese and later we’re told he had a flash back to his Vietnam service. I’m always suspicious of those claims and read a statistic that suggested there are only 880,000 Vietnam Vets still alive though some nine to thirteen million people claim service in country. The vast majority of people who claim they are Vietnam Veterans are lying about it.

So, they reach Plaskett and suddenly one of the team members is screaming for the doctor and I’m thinking, “What doctor?” But, of course there is a doctor with them, along with cameramen, and sound engineers and other support personnel that we never see (until this show when the cameramen are shown in the background. Do the camera operators drag all that heavy equipment through the jungle themselves or do they have help? Just how large is that support team? Who all is on it?). Okay, that’s no surprise because it would be impossible for all of the team to appear on film together with changing angles and whatnot without there being camera operators around. Here, however we get the proof because the doctor appears and suggests that Plaskett is dehydrated. He doesn’t seem to respond at first, but eventually comes around telling them that it was a flash back from one of his two tours in Vietnam (and I have to wonder again if I’m the only service member in the world who had only a single tour).

Although his team understands about PTSD, and there is a cheesy announcement at the end of the episode about helping our vets, I’m outraged that they would bring this into a faked reality show about treasure hunting in Argentina for the purpose of building dramatic ratings. And, knowing that so many “Vietnam Vets” are vets only in their minds, I did a little checking. Posted to Plaskett’s Facebook page are pictures of him receiving a medal while in uniform. One of the pictures is of sufficient quality that I can see the medals he’s wearing and they include the Vietnam Service and Vietnam Campaign which, given the circumstances confirms a tour in Vietnam but not necessarily two. And, given that picture, I have no reason to doubt other aspects of his claim of lengthy naval service.

As I say, I’m just annoyed that they brought this PTSD thing forward in a dramatic way. It reinforces a stereotype of the Vietnam Vet. Back in the old days, when I had a real job that required I go to an office every day and do work to make a living, I let it slip one day that I had served in Vietnam (and hey, if you want proof, go to the 187^th AHC web site and look me up). One of the other employees couldn’t believe it. She said, “But you seem so normal.” So, yes, I’m a little sensitive to this and really don’t need to see it exploited on television in this cheap way.

I wouldn’t have even brought this up, except for a comment made to one of the postings I made about this show. A commenter, identified only as Claude (who just created his “profile” in December 2016 and has one view, me) wrote, “The team travels up river and travels hours through the ‘jungle’ to find the Santa Ana mission. Total BS! You can't get from the river to the mission without crossing the highway. Thanks to google maps, all they had to do is drive down highway 12 from the nearby town and take the small road to the visitor’s center and walk a hundred yards. In filming they were careful not to show the flood lights mounted on the ground to illuminate the mission at night. Not so remote as they would have us believe.”

I’m not going to comment on this unless I do a little checking myself which, given the Internet and Google Earth, isn’t all that difficult. I found the grid coordinates for Reduccion de Neustra Senora de Santa Ana which are 27 degrees 23 minutes South and 55 degrees 34 minutes west, which puts us in a field with highways running very close to it. No journey on a river into the remote jungle, no long trek through the thick vegetation, but a highway that runs very close and a town not too far away. In fact, you can stay in a Sheridan Resort Hotel for about three hundred bucks a night, which includes a buffet breakfast… so do the treasure hunters remain the jungle, in their tents, or do they set them up, talk about roughing it and retire to a hotel which probably has Internet, HBO, and that buffet breakfast?

Sure the jungle around them is remote and filled with dangerous creatures, but remember some of the Guarani showed up demanding to know what they were doing and eventually invited them to meet with village elders. Wasn’t one of these guys wearing an “Old Navy” T-shirt? Doesn’t that suggest the village might not be quite as remote as they suggest? And doesn’t it seem odd that some guy in a black market in Paraguay tells them he had a silver bar from this mission when it is apparently a big tourist attraction in Argentina with operating hours and recommendations for accommodations? Not to mention, didn’t anyone on the show think that some of us would resort to using the Internet to learn a little bit more about all of this? In the world today, it is very simple to use a variety of search engines to discover just what is going on and seeing just how “remote” the area is, and then find the hyperbole more than a little annoying.

Treasure Quest - Season Two or the Boondoggle Continues

Season Two of Treasure Quest – Snake Island has begun without the Snake Island part but with many more snakes, almost all of them described as the deadliest in the world. These are highly venomous snakes and the world’s largest constrictor. While I would argue the point about the venomous snakes being the most toxic,

A Green Anaconda because I wanted a picture

to illustrate this post.

the constrictor, the anaconda, is recognized as the world’s largest snake. But I digress.

For those who haven’t lost interest yet, it seems that this Treasure of the Trinity isn’t the gold and silver that was massed to ransom the last emperor of the Inca, Atahuallpa, but treasure collected by Portuguese explorer Alexio Garcia in Brazil in 1524. This treasure, mostly silver, though our pals on Treasure Quest keep talking about gold, apparently ended up with the Guarani in Paraguay. The history of the region suggests that the Guarani used the treasure in trade, or in other words, used it for their own purposes and there is no longer a large stash to find but never let the historical record get in the way of a television adventure. Far be it for me to throw cold, dirty water on this quest.

The team, augmented with a local guide this year, have moved from Snake Island onto mainland South America, more specifically, Paraguay where they claim to be at one of the Guarani villages. Here they are assaulted by snakes, scorpions, spiders and even piranha. We see a venomous snake found in their camp but it is captured by the team herpetologist Bryan Fry (who has been bitten by snakes 23 times which suggests he’s doing something wrong), put in a box and taken away. I don’t know what they did with it but hey, it is a venomous snake so I don’t actually care that much.

We have scuba diving into a river that is so murky that it is impossible to see the bottom while standing on it or about even about two inches in front of one’s face, if one is in the river. There is a sudden problem that might relate to the piranha and those left on the boat begin throwing chum into the water to draw the piranha away from the divers but we don’t really know if there are any piranha in that section of the river at that time… this seems like drama for the sake of drama but with no real basis in what is actually going on.

I could go on but I’ll just jump to the end in what seems to have been staged. We’ve got a couple of people wandering around on the bank of the river, pounding in stakes as if involved in some archaeological dig (does the Paraguayan government know about this?) when they find a pottery shard. The diver/archaeologist Meghan Heaney-Grier says that its 300 or 400 years old. Minutes later, and buried about three inches below the surface they find what seems to be an intact pot. It just seems to me that a pot that close to the surface, in terrain that is muddy at best would have been crushed long before these people show up to discover it. To me, that smacks of producers hiding it to be found to underscore the idea that they are on the site of an ancient Guarani town/village where the Treasure of the Trinity might once have been hidden… Sorry, I just don’t buy it.

For those interested, I will hang around for a couple more shows, but they’d better produce something more than drama with snakes and piranha if they expect me to make it through the season. Let’s have some treasure for crying out loud before this turns into another boondoggle like that Oak Island show where they have yet to find treasure.