In clearing space on my camera for the upcoming adventures, I ran across a few shots of fellow Alphaholics singing the national anthem at the memorial service for our cadavers earlier this month and thought I would add a few more introductions. Lieutenant James Wirthlin, here on the left, is also a gem of a human being, but is not in our platoon, so we'll let someone else introduce him somewhere else. On the far right is Lieutenant Robbie Wetzler. Robbie isn't self-conscious about showing enthusiasm or curiosity or nerdiness. He has a confidence that comes from internal stability and doesn't need to validate himself from the judgments of others. Just right of him is Lieutenant Andrew Fisher, an acupuncturist in his former life and Army linguist before that. I've known him just a few days shy of a year now, and I don't think I've ever seen him upset. He has a serenity one might expect from someone who's studied eastern medicine, but wouldn't necessarily expect from someone running with a litter or shouting over simulated gunfire to get his team in position. I've nominated him platoon massage officer, though I'm not sure his certification is still current. I haven't exactly told him this yet. Lucas Groves has been voted platoon hug officer (also perhaps without his full knowledge and consent), though Sameer has put a procedural hold on the appointment until we elect a second, female hug officer, just in case Sameer lapses into "need a hug" status while the affirmative action measure is still pending approval.
The soldier in the beret is Lieutenant Marion Keehn, a former trombonist in the Army band with the magic superpower of getting the lights and sound to work correctly in the lecture halls. There is a line in Wuthering Heights (which may be perhaps the only redeeming thing about Wuthering Heights) where Cathy justifies her manipulative, vengeful, abusive relationship with Heathcliff by claiming, "Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same." Until that moment, I had never really thought that Cathy was the same as Heathcliff, and I thought less of her for thinking that, but that concept of being made of the same substance as me describes a few of the friends I have run across in life, and Marion is one of them. We both came from households permeated and shaped by NPR, where Cheerios and steamed broccoli were not just more healthy but more moral than Lucky Charms and canned green beans, and where road trips were about family bonding, darn it, not curling up in your own little world with headphones and a book. One could be stranded on a desert island with him for quite some time before it would start to get boring. I'm not exactly sure why you would train your trombonist in dead reckoning, but, between the two of us, we rocked the land nav course by eyeballing it, barely even breaking out a pace count or compass (though in the classroom he did pull out his calculator, which he had programmed to calculate the azimuths, just for fun).
We'll fill in more as the week progresses.
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