What is this strange feeling I have? I don't have to gag every time I catch a whiff of myself. My hair isn't encrusted with sebum and sweat and sand. There is no mud or charcoal or gunpowder or bolt grease or MRE marinara sauce encrusted in my nails or elbows or neck. My clothes are not mottled with mud and leaves and grass stains. There are no jungles of hair growing on my legs or axilla. It must be the sensation known as "clean." What a beautiful experience, this clean.
This morning, though, I took my wonderfully clean body and had to put it back into unwashed fatigues to traverse a series of Jazeeri terrain obstacles with a small band of assorted Alpha Company ninjas caught behind enemy lines with me in a region of Jazeeristan known as the Leadership Reaction Course. The PJF had exploded and booby-trapped various bridges and dams and critical molten-lava-crossing points, and we had to get ourselves and various equipment and patients to ralley points on the other side. As a platoon, we really hadn't gotten much opportunity to work with the others in our company, and it was pretty inspiring to see the rest of the talent pool we have. Ted Steelman, Becky Hardy, Angelina Ruiz, Megan Ginn, Sean McIntire, Muoy Lim, and Matt Hawks joined Liz Miller, Andrew Fisher, Kevin Gray and me in a series of teamwork mindgames in which we pitted Sean's brute strength against Becky's killer assymetrical groin stretch against Ted's invincibility. I can't claim that we always got across in time with all of our equipment and patients in tact, but we came away with the kind of bonding that really only comes from holding hands to guide one another on precarious makeshift cantilevers across radioactive lava.
The first order of business back at the barracks was a hike to the FIG-Jazeeristan laundromat to remove the foul, toxic stench from our Kerkesner uniforms. Doubling the detergent works well for this. While we were waiting, various servicemen from the post would come up to chat, always a little shocked at our generous spatterings of bruises, moleskin, and medical tape. They seemed a little incredulous that we were medical corps, and even more incredulous that we were both officers and medical students undergoing something so intense. While we were there Lieutenant Mike Cullen texted Becky Hardy to inform her that we were advised not to defecate in the barrack toilets until the plumbing problem could be addressed or porta-johns could be obtained. But, really, what else did they expect from digestive tracts so abused? The locals proved very helpful, pointing us to their secret caches of carbonated beverages, paperbacks, and foot/groin wipes. I won't name names, but let's just say certain people were very excited about that particular selection of commodities.
After laundry, we disbursed to the four winds for naps and calling families and dinner excursions. I joined a crowd of Alphaholics at the one local restaurant--a family diner known as Funk's. It was hard to tell if the food was actually excellent, or if any cooked meal would have been beloved after a week alternating white bread sandwhiches and MREs. At one point, Marion turned to Steve and asked, "You have kids, right?" "That's the seventh time you asked me that, including three on the bus from Antietam. No." "We've been trying to find the right girl for Steve for almost a year now. The problem is that he's looking for super low-maintenance. When I asked him whether that meant he didn't have to spend much money on them or that they didn't need much time and attention, he asked if it were possible to find someone that fit both." "Such a woman is very hard to find, Steve. Perhaps you could get a pet--a fish, maybe." It appears that all of the USUHS faculty and staff have been deployed out to Jazeeristan and half of them ate at Funk's tonight. The more NCOs we see wandering around, the more we wonder if they remembered to leave anybody back on campus to run anything there--the library, the clinic, admin, anything.
Marion used his iPhone GPS to land-nav us a new azimuth back to the barracks from the restaurant. It only involved crossing one small stream, maybe. We found ourselves still scanning the woods for hostile forces and scanning the ground for obstacles behind to which to obtain cover from them, even though our deployment had finished. We're told it's not PTSD unless it persists after the initial month or two. The final stretch was straight uphill, but by now the ony thing we know how to do on hills is to charge and take them by force, so that's what we did, beating the group on the traditional route by six minutes.
Tomorrow, we start support for Bushmaster. I'll also see if I can track down a heftier network to get the images up from yesterday and today. Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment