Last night, the fireflies accompanied my little wet-wipe spongebath again, but this time one of the other platoons had returned to camp quite late, so I had plenty of reason to be paranoid about a flash of light indicating that I was mooning a little more than just a treeline. I slept through the entire night, though, which was a good sign.
It occurred to me this morning as I ate my third vegetable manicotti MRE that I haven't quite figured out what the vegetable is, unless they're counting the tomato sauce. It's just some mystery filling that probably includes some sort of cheese product also.
The having the specter of MOPP gear removed from hanging over our heads added a spring in our step this morning and made for all sorts of excitement as we headed to our first mission--a joint training operation at the FIG-Jazeeristan, PA, firing range with the local PFJ unit. Even without computers and projecters and tech support, the day still started with powerpoint, with slides describing the safe handling of an M-9 printed onto flip charts. The M-9 has some of the elegance I was searching for in the M-16, with a smooth molded body and sturdy, but not clunky heft. It could be that the training ones are also a whole lot newer than our training M-16s, but there still seems to be a whole lot more functionality in it.
TSgt Habblett brought the eight of us who had never used one before forward to practice walking through firing procedures, but I don't think he realized that all the instruction we had been given so far was where to not point them. He instructed us to slide back the slide and then let it close, but didn't really tell us how to do that. Wham! Real-world pinched palm. Sigh. And more bothersome, now I was getting blood all over the gun and my other hand and someone would surely notice my real-world divot and blood and make a real-world fuss. I was sharing a gun with Jen Nuetzi. She saw my palm when I handed it over, even though I tried to curl it up quickly. "Are you bleeding?" She knew the answer to that question, but she had the sense not to say it loudly. "Don't worry about it." She gave me a look, asking if I was kidding. "I'll deal with it." Jen is one of my favorite people at USUHS, and she can tell when I intend to stand my ground. When we were done with the instruction and TSgt Habblett had gone back and taught us how to keep our hands clear of critical moving parts, we went back to the bleachers and discreetly dug in the medic kit for a real-world band-aid. I felt bad about getting blood on their gun, but it wasn't very much, and couldn't really be seen against the black unless you were looking for it.
I had kinda been hoping to get a glimpse of the appeal of firearms, to get a sense of what about them was so attractive that almost half of American households feel the need to own one, despite the fact that a weapon kept at home is statistically much more likely to be used in the injury or death of household members than on intruders. What is it about these objects that makes people feel safer? To be honest, there was a sexiness of holding the 9 mm pistol at first, a kind of vixen dangerousness about the heavy metal. But it was surprisingly un-sexy when fully empty, and when I looked down the site, it was once again dangerous-unnerving to contemplate its destructive power rather than dangerous-alluring. And then the real-world blood kinda snapped me back to the reality of how, in order to produce the kind of explosive power to drive a bullet into a person, it had to have a certain degree of mechanical crudity, including parts that pinch and don't fit woman hands comfortably and make messes when used. The majority of negligent discharges on deployment come from senior officers who certify on them and then don't practice with them regularly. A quick self-reflecting risk assessment says I am probably at a very high risk for falling into that category, so it's a good thing to learn a healthy degree of over-caution now.
We didn't certify on the M-9 today, just familiarized. While we were waiting for the other groups to go, we grilled Captain Lynch on real-world stuff we'll need to know to train our medics. He seemed to enjoy the audience. I can proudly say slightly more than half of my 45 rounds hit the target, and one even hit about an inch and a half from the center dot. I still haven't quite figured out the breathing thing, given that you're supposed to inhale before shooting with a camera but exhale before shooting with a firearm. Jason Bauman's had a nice, tidy little cluster-diagram right around the center. We used him as our entry for the company competition, and he shot all five rounds onto the 9"x11" paper, though none hit the paper's center, giving us five points. We're probably not winning that one, given that the team representative from yesterday didn't even shoot all of their five in twenty seconds.
They gave us an orange in our sack lunch today and a huge bag of ice for our Camelbaks, and wow were we happy. Downright jolly. We almost stoned Amy Alexander with all of our ketchup packets simultaneously we were so thrilled. Not being in MOPP GEAR, real-world fruit, hitting a sweet spot in the weather all put us in a rather festive mood.
After lunch, the orders came in for our next mission--a humanitarian aid doctor had been taken hostage by the PJF, and it was up to us to rescue him. This involved, like most convoy missions, a lot of patrolling, which is military-speak for walking in uncomfortable places with guns out. At least this time Steve Colonna had the sense to have us take positions as pairs so as to allow for more sustainable work/rest ratios. I was paired with Anthon Lemon, another of my favorite people at USUHS. When we were originally assigned platoons near the beginning of the school year, there was a moment when they had us randomly form up into three squads within those assigned platoons, had us write down those sets, and then declared those to be our official groupings for the next four years. I remember at that moment, before they declared these pairings to be lasting, looking at the crowd of almost-strangers around me and pulling Anthon and Jen to my sides as we got into formation. I did not realize then that I was selecting my patrol buddies, my tentmates, the people who would be across the litter helping me carry patients. Had I realized the carrying stuff, I might have instead grabbed someone bigger and sronger, but there is security in knowing that if they are the ones that get injured, at least their weight is not far from mine since I will be the closest one available to carry them. And, really, as Anthon and I crawled up hills and into ditches, I felt grateful to have selected battle buddies for their company rather than pure functionality, because that is part of what makes all of this worth it anyway.
The patrolling seemed to go on forever, as Chanuk helicopters circled just above the treeline. The Billy Joel song "Good Night Saigon" kept running through my head--"They heard the hum of the motors, they counted the rotors, and waited for us to arrive." I wondered if someone could explain to me how to hear the difference between different helicopter rotor numbers or if it's something you just pick up subconsciously with practice. It helped that the road, though dusty gravel itself, was surrounded by absolutely beautiful woods, covered across the floor with ferns. Beautiful, but not functional. There can be a lot of trip hazards under a foot of ferns.
A local informant met us along the path and informed us us where the doctor was being held. We bounded up the treeline and then was our chance to, as Dan Bailey said, bring on maximal aggression. And, oh, we brought it. Blanks popped continuously from our cover team as we ran across a very exposed road and behind the cover of a very large, rock-lined ditch. At one point, the rocks under him slipped and Colonna face-planted, but popped up again faster than I thought someone over thirty was really capable. We decided to take an alternate route into the hot house, but the terrain was very exposed, and in trying to move to the mouth of a drainage tunnel entrance, I was hit in my upper abdomen near my spleen by a sniper in the upstairs window.
Getting shot during hostage rescue during train-up week was almost nice, a chance to rest for a minute, but this time was definitely a disappointment. Here I had built up all this adrenaline to bring on maximal aggression and storm a house and instead was wasting it, lying on the ground with my intestinal viscera hanging out. What a let-down. Catherine Imes was immediately dispatched to give me buddy care. She opened up my bag to search for something to staunch the bleeding and protect my herniating guts. My mind raced through what I knew was there...sunscreen--nope...chapstick--nope...then my racing mind caught hold on something. Hadn't cookies made everything better yesterday? "Catherine, my cookies! Use my cookies!" "What?" She wasn't buying it, and the team was yelling for her to hurry up and join them. She grabbed an empty MRE bag and wrapped my prodruding viscera in it and told me to hold it on and apply direct pressure. She ran off, and I was able to remove my belt with one hand and strap my new modified pressure dressing on tight. It occurred to me after she had run off that I should have had her take my ammo, but the moment had passed. I cleared my weapon, put it on safety, and waited for more definitive medical care to come with the medical support squad. It took a while for them to bound far enough forward to notice me, and by then I had lost quite a bit of blood and the pulses in my extremities were weak. Still, my legs moved, and I could assist Ian McDougall in dragging me across a road and back behind the cover of protective boulders (but not the big convenient one that happened to house a nest of real-world hornets).
While my squad crouch-walked through tunnels and had fun storming the castle, I was back with the medical platoon, watching as more and more of my comrades were hit. Amy Alexander stepped on an anti-personnel land-mine and was knocked unconscious. When they found her, she wasn't breathing, but a quick and agressive decompression of her tension pneumothorax brought her lungs to life again. My MRE wrapper was replaced with a specialty guts-bandage and a liter of isotonic saline was pumped via magic Camelbak IV into me to bring up my fluid volume. Glen Olson had been hit in the leg and his entire face burned, Kevin Gray had face and eye burns, and Lucas Groves's hip and chest had taken several rounds. In addition, the team to find the doctor hostage had taken so much enemy fire that they shot her in the leg before they realized who she was--Connie Barko. Several very brave squad members were killed in action trying to rescue her, and I couldn't get over the guilt that if they hadn't been going at it a man down, it might have gone differently.
Eventually, though, the whole team made it out of the house, walking or dragged, and the ambulance came to take us away to the provisional medical care BAS, today courtesy of Alpha Two. We decided they would most benefit from intense patients, so the moment they came to search the vehicle, we started screaming and crying hysterically. I had to be carried by my armpits and knees off the ambulance to the triage litter, which was among the more uncomfortable things that can happen to someone nursing a GSW to the abdomen. Through my tears and screams, they were able to discern both that I had protruding viscera and a weakening pulse, and that both of those had already been provisionally addressed at the casualty collection point on site. No one seemed to remember that injury, though, because they soon rolled me onto the side of my bursting guts to transport me. Someone decided my hysteria was getting a little much, so they gave me morphine. Which made me vomit, a violent wretching on which I proceeded to choke and then lose consciousnesss. When I stopped breathing, the PA on duty suggested CPR. No one swept my airway, though they did tip me over again onto my wounded side to allow me to finish my vomiting over the edge of the litter. After some discussion as to the proper ratio of breaths to chest compressions, someone started pounding on my right breast, about an inch off the sternum. Thirty is a lot of compressions when one is conscious enough to feel them. I was tagged and taken to the holding area, but immediately new visitors were arriving for the BAS, and we were told to send ourselves to the helo landing pad and meet up with our group again to turn in our M-16's because we were leaving the premisis. To go paintballing.
How awesome a day can you get? I've never been paintballing before, but the idea of turning one another into Jackson Pollack works, all the while simulating attack in a way that allowed for accurate accounting of hits and misses, was wonderfully appealing. Flack vests...oh, not appealing at all. Being switched to medic after they wiped out our first two in line? Actually, within just a few minutes, they had wiped out twenty-six of the thirty of us, so I was running back and forth to everybody, adding tourniquets and pressure dressings and stabbing 16-gauge or lower sticks into tension pneumothoraces and yelling at anybody who could still fire a weapon to aim it out at the still at-large enemy and mostly feeling a overwhelmed. Our squad got to join the cadre on opposing force for the next round, and I got to fire round after round of purple rubber casing that made a satisfying yellow splatter as it hit the corners of various obstacles behind which they were ducking. By the third round, I was back on the good guys' team, wearing the ridiculously unwieldy medic bag as we provided support to the hostage-rescuing squads.
A paintball gun is surprisingly ergonomic and maneuverable. They look quite a bit sillier than real weapons, but the handling made much more sense, and I was a pretty solid shot with mine, much better than what I had managed with live rounds at the range this morning. We were wearing full face masks and gloves, but I still managed to hit our main op-for kingpen squarely in the neck when he popped up to get a more solid shot at Jen and me. The entire mission was chaotic, and confusted. Jen swapped out with Nicole Baker as Charlie Team leader because Nicole was starting to get a heat head-ache, and Liz Miller swapped out with Steve Colonna as Platoon Leader, managing a surprisingly effective opperation for someone who's been mostly playing the role of average-Joe rather than Grand Master Strategizer for most of the ops. As the bus was pulling out of the paintball range, two boys and their parents sitting at a card-table in front of their house flagged the bus down. They entered and announced that they would be giving us popsicles.
Could the day get any better? I chose a yellow, and it's icy delicious goodness was just a joy. The boy was Harrison, a ten year old cub scout, who is part of an effort to send cheer items to the troops out in the field. They figured this was there chance to bring cheer to the troops at home. There was cheering for scouts and cheering for Harrison and cheers for popsicles and cheers for Alpha Three and cheers because we were just so darn happy. Then the driver turned up the radio and Alicia Scribner started a sing-along in the back which spread its way up through "Don't Speak" and "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" and felt like a junior high field trip, the kind where friendships are made for life, where you run into each other ten years later and say "remember when...?". I'm so glad that we get to practice together within the same system for the next two decades.
Sometimes we have to fake liking this stuff. Today was not one of those times. Even dinner felt festive.
Tomorrow is infantry platoon day. Bring it.
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