An "Insider" Look at Survivor: Vanuatu, Episode 9: But He's Not Bitter...

Most of you are probably expecting an extended rant where I complain about Sarge being gone. Nope. Am I upset? Of course. The problem is, between getting rid of John and trusting Julie - not to mention listening to Rory about who they should vote for - he had every opportunity to change the game around, and he screwed up. So while I hate Ami (even though I can respect her game play and applaud her if she wins) and the women's alliance, and I want to see Eliza go down in worse flames than Roger from The Amazon, I can't blame them for Sarge's ouster. For them, it was the smart thing to do. With that:

Sarge's Final Words: He walks away with a new perspective on the way people look at things, whether their name and beliefs are worth a dollar. He will know the new generation now that he has met the new generation, he'll look at them as willing to change who they are for a dollar. When he grew up, you never gave up the one thing that Daddy gave you, your word.

He learned that he has to have compassion for those who believe that money means everything because they're people too. He used to say that half of society doesn't have values, and that's wrong, they do have values but their values are different than his. He lives by Army values, they live however they were brought up. His values are concrete - loyalty, duty, respect, self-assurance, honor, integrity, and personal courage. Obviously not the first time he's listed them, by the way he rattles them off. He cannot be bought at any price by anyone.

He was surprised by the way people cling together when the basic necessities of life are taken away. Everybody doesn't have the ability to go out and get the basics, so they will cling to groups and do things they normally wouldn't do. Someone who is afraid of spiders, like himself, will walk right up to one just to get a plantain.

The greatest experience was that he got to come to an island in the South Pacific and live on it with 18 people that he doesn't even know. Now he knows them - he can't say that someone he's only known for 28 days is a friend. But he saw some of the most beautiful land in the world, and got to meet some great friends. A poor country boy from Virginia wouldn't be able to do that.

He would not change anything about the way he played the game. In his occupation, he doesn't see any male/female gender. They're all great Americans, and he doesn't think the gender game. Everybody's great, he'll take the best qualities of each. Half the males were shady and half the females were shady, so you've got to have good people to make a good group.

Sarge, the Day After: His experience overall was educational and vacational. Not "vocational" as the CBS website says. Yeah, Sarge's word isn't really a word, but vocational makes absolutely no sense. He got to see a part of the world that most of the world won't see. But he learned a lot about human character and what people will do in a tight spot. He learned how deep he'll go into a game of character and ethics. He learned you can have a lot of fun, but you can get emotionally ill, to the point where he could see how much it hurt people to get stabbed in the back. He could see how it affected someone's personality and demeanor when they're in a game like this. You don't see it all at once, you see the depletion of someone's spirit slowly. At first he didn't mind, he thought he could handle it, but as time went on he didn't like the way it made him feel, but he had to play the game so as to not give up his word to others. As we've seen, that's not usually the best way to win. Actually, that's never the best way to win.

The biggest challenge of the game was psychological, not physical. He could handle every aspect of the game physically, to him it was a vacation. None of the challenges were difficult to him. But when he had to tear somebody down to advance himself, he wondered how far he would go for a dollar. He realized he won't go that far. He would rather be a minimum wage worker with lots of friends than a wealthy person with shallow friends that he always had to watch.