First off, I would like to apologize that I did not play paparazzi this morning. In my quest for consistently sharp action shots (except for, um, the ones where the camera woman is running), I have been recharging my battery every night. This morning I remembered the camera, but not to grab the battery from the charger. Catherine Imes got some decent shots, and a small cadre of videographers came to follow the morning's action, so it did not go entirely undocumented.
The morning began with the news that last night a man ran into Major Burns's fist. While Major Burns was walking in Georgetown with his wife, a middle-aged drunk tried to mug him. When he threatened to stab the pair, Major Burns broke his jaw and gave him a subdural hematoma, compressing Major Burns's fourth and fifth metacarpals in the process. He then proceeded to administer aid to the man like any good ER doc would do. ("Now, can you describe to me what happened?") To me mugging in general seems like a rather bad idea, but, even before seeing Glen Burns in action, I would still judge him to be a sub-optimal target. Something about the height, the shoulders, the utter lack of timidity, but, hey, what do I know?
This morning's adventures consisted, in the words of Lieutenant Edward Dolomisiewicz, of "getting paid to play GI Joe." Remembering, of course, that I never played GI Joe when I wasn't getting paid for it (unless you count the summer we set up little green army men to be Spider Special Forces in the shower to maintain security). For me, it's an exercise in irony, pretending to play GI Joe with my fake gun. For Eddie, the irony is that the gun is fake. It was hard not to get enthusiastic, though, when Lieutenant Dan Raboin started us out in full face paint and ultra-nerd gas mask insert goggles. Raboin was an Army pharmacist in his former life, and has always struck me as polite and reserved, but paint him green and out pops a commander capable of instilling obedience and just a little bit of anxiety in his troops. He and Eddie gave us a brief classroom overview on the basic choreography of tactical movement, then took us outside, handed out our rubber duckies, and coached us through individual movement techniques to stay alive while crossing terrain and engaging enemy forces.
Lewis Thomas writes about how one solitary ant or termite or fish is pretty dumb, but get a critical mass of them together and suddenly they move as if coordinated by one mind. They can turn en masse to evade a predator or devour a meal and can build using seemingly spontaneous structural design. Brazilian soccer players are kind of like that, handling the ball as a collective unit rather than as individual decision-makers. When Dan and Eddie took us out to the field and Dan took Ian McDougall, Dan Bailey, Lucas Groves, Amy Alexander, and Seamus Cobb through right-flank ("blackjack") maneuver with an enemy engaged, that was the image that came to my mind, this wonderful coordinated dance of running and crawling and shooting and popping up and down and yelling "bang-bang."
So we spent the morning trying to get the rest of us that well in-sync. In a stupid, myopic sort of way, I never really figured there was all that much an infantry troop had to know how to do. Point, shoot. Not shoot each other. Not get shot. Just those four tasks take a surprising amount of teamwork and practice, and we haven't even addressed doing the second one efficaciously yet. I am suddenly a lot less indignant about the fact that early in Operation Iraqi Freedom we had more casualties from friendly fire than from opposing fire and the fact that the number one cause of death in active duty military is accidents.
USUHS was built on the NNMC golf course and has some wonderful rolling, manicured hills that are pretty ideal for crawling around on one's stomach holding a fake rifle in various formations. Once we had mastered the sitting-ducks open-air maneuvers, we trekked into the woods and engaged the enemy from within the trees and ground-cover. I learned another reason to be grateful for my k-pot helmet; it makes a great battering ram against tree branches that would otherwise have constantly been slapping me in the face. My team leader is Lieutenant Nichole Baker. She likes things done right, and I respect that. She dislocated a rib last week and it's killing her not be full-on rough-and-tumble at all of this. At one point, we were attempting to charge up a ravine, and my boots could not find anything to grip in the mud. Every branch I tried to grab broke off in my hand like in a cartoon. Dan Bailey behind me had to run up and give my rear a boost, for which I was very grateful. We never quite got the whole group to be as smooth and synchronized as the demo team, but we did manage to bump off or capture every combatant we faced today without one of us dying, which was a huge improvement over yesterday. Jaime Piercy twister her ankle, but pressed on and navigated the afternoon on crutches.
This afternoon Seargent Ermle taught us how to handle attacks with chemical, biological, or radiological contamination. The trick is to put lots of dreadfully hot clothing and equipment between yourself and the outside world. The other trick is that previous users covered this clothing in charcoal powder to neutralize all things nefarious (except, of course, the spiders living in the gas masks), and that charcoal powder infiltrates everything. The NNMC decontamination experts came to show us a portable decontamination station, we learned how not to stab ourselves accidentally with the Valium pens, and we got to check out fake ordinances and IEDs. Then came the MOPP gear. We looked a little bit like astronauts and little bit like GI jet-puff marshmallow men before we put on the gas masks and a little bit like aardvarks or space invaders with the gas masks and a little bit like chimney sweeps in the charcoal, but it certainly beats dying of weaponized botox. Then we proceeded to do the MOPP gear decontamination strip-tease, just in case you were worried that we would make it through a training day without having a pretense to feel each other up.
When I got home, I called my roommate from the driveway so he could open the back door and I could strip off my cammies in the backyard and toss the whole blackened, muddied, and grass-stained ensemble in the wash without getting anything on the rest of the house. With my gear off, you can make out a bruise the shape of West Virginia just above my elbow. Actually, now that I look around, I think you could probably find a bruise on my body the shape of any one of the fifty states right now--this one from the butt of my weapon, this one from diving to take cover behind a log, this one from putting up a little too much resistance against the marine combatives trainer yesterday, this one from the Swiss seat. I have a massage scheduled for Saturday morning and I don't want her to be gentle. If it were a doctor about to see that much of my body, I would worry about having to explain that I'm really not a domestic violence victim, but I think with a masseuse I should be safe.
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