Last-minute Packing

I should start with a public health warning. Normally I don't really consider it my responsibility to pass these things on, but this one's kinda important. If someone comes to your front door saying they are checking for ticks due to the warm weather and asks you to take your clothes off and dance around with your arms up, DO NOT DO IT! THIS IS A SCAM! They only want to see you naked.

I wish I'd gotten this yesterday. I feel so stupid.

Sorry. Alright, back to Alphaholics. Over break, phone calls have shot back and forth from various camping and athletic supply stores about the availability and suitability of various Kerkesner "must-haves." We have debated the merits of Maglites versus dorky LED headlamps and whether "kid wipes" are just baby wipes in less embarrassing packages and whether it will really be necessary for every platoon member to bring enough DEET to poison the entire bird population of Bethesda. Sample text-message exchange from break:

"I'm at Andrews mil clothing--anybody need anything?"
"A turtle and three goats."
"Cheap cotton goats or microfiber?"
"Microfiber goats, please."

I started reading Life of Pi and just got to the part where they feed one of the rhinoceros's companion goats to the tiger to demonstrate to the kid that tigers are dangerous. It's hard to get rid of the image of this three-days starved, ferocious tiger furiously devouring this terrified, bleating ball of polyester (that in my mind resembles my fuzzy moss-green Thorlos) and at some point realizing he's been duped.

We've been interviewing prospective roommates over the past two weeks, and I find myself explaining that there won't usually be fatigues soaked in bug toxins drying on the back patio or a gas mask hanging from the laundry room sink and wondering if it would be going too far to also reassure them that we don't also have a Cold War-era bomb-shelter and year's worth of SpaghettiOs hidden in the crawl space. Explaining it to friends who've known me for years has been a little more complicated. When they ask what I'm doing this summer and I say we'll be triaging mannequins in the woods at night while someone shoots paintballs at us, they usually smile politely and then tip their head and squint as if looking deeply into my soul to try to figure out whether this side was hiding in there all along or whether some pod person has come to inhabit their friend's body in the past year. Sometimes they'll ask outright. I don't really know how to answer that question. It's not any less weird for me than it would have been before or than it would be for them, but if I'm doing it anyway, I might as well dive in all the way and enjoy it, right? My dad, a retired Army JAG officer who started trying to talk me into applying to USUHS years before I even decided I wanted to go to med school, is thrilled whenever he sees his little princess getting dirty. Over Independence Day weekend, I overheard him on the phone telling some relative that "She's really getting a kick out of the military aspect of it." My instinct was to protest the slander, but he's not exactly wrong.

They were interviewing a reporter on NPR the other day who had spent a tour of duty embedded with a marine unit in Afghanistan and he was discussing how, in the absence of the draft, the general American populace is kinda divorced from the military, with only a very small percentage of families taking on the sacrifices for everyone else. I suspect some of it is just a fear of leaving our comfort zones. I think if we could just find the activation energy to get over that hump, we'd discover we're capable of much more than we originally thought.

My washing machine, for example, did not think it could handle charcoal-saturated MOPP gear. Three cycles later, it still hasn't quite proven that it can. We never promised it would be easy. But it's getting better each time, and the water draining out is becoming progressively less black.

Moleskin? Check. Sunscreen? Check. Theme song? In progress. We'll keep you updated.