Living Outside the CAGE

Sopapillas

2009-09-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

Our MS-II year has begun. We are gaining a whole new sympathy for the whiney MS-IIs before us. It's hard not to notice that a whole different kind of love permeating Lecture Room D than this time last year in Lecture Room E.

In case there was any question, and despite some rather creative accounting, Alpha Three was crowned Honor Platoon, with Eddie Dolomisiewicz and Rebecca Hardy as the official Kerkesner Rockstars. We do have to give a whole lot of credit--there were plenty of other rockstar achievements in Kerkesner adventures outside of our little circle of victory. It's worth getting them to tell their stories as well.

Ours got some level of quasi-closure at Guapo's today. But, of course, it wasn't any sort of resolution. Getting the promised reward just made it even more clear that we had never been in it for the reward.

This is about where I have to admit that Major Burns was right all along.

Thanks, sir.

For those who are wondering, the Alphaholics, and all of the original platoons, will get to stay together for Bushmaster. Hopefully, they'll consult with Major B in the intervening years and do some tweaking. In between, we're back to being regular medical students. Maybe they'll give us breaks occasionally and let us storm a building somewhere with water guns. The library would probably be a bad idea, just because of the whole water thing, but I think the cafeteria would be a good place to simulate urban warfare. We could just ambush some ethics discussion group to capture a known insurgent leader.

LRC laser tag anybody?

Whoops--sorry.

2009-08-12T21:40:00.000-07:00

So I accidentally used Html without realizing it, which has led to some confusion about how to get to Bushmaster photos. The email address has been corrected. Apologies.

Complete Albums Are Up

2009-08-04T01:09:00.001-07:00

The complete Kerkesner albums--all 1442 photos--are now up on the Alphaholics Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3208518&op=2&o=global&view=global&subj=1590892337&id=726287017#/group.php?gid=224911420640&ref=search

The order is a little funky because of how I had to load them in bulk. As always, to request the full digital file of any of them, contact me directly.

How to Access the Bushmaster Moulage Photos

2009-07-25T17:07:00.000-07:00

So photos of gunshot wounds to the head, even simulated gunshot wounds to the head made of wax and stage blood, can be pretty disturbing for the general public to see.

Which is why I can't just post them here or on the facebook albums for random people to stumble across.

So I posted the best 85% of them on a blog of their own: http://bushmastermoulage2009.blogspot.com/

The catch is that, in order to comply with administration requests about the use of these, we've had to restrict access to it. So here's the dealio. Email bushmastermoulage [at] gmail [dot] com with "[your email address here] has read the disclaimer and wants access to the moulage photos" as the subject line. I'll check it every couple days or so during clerkships, and we can go from there.

I'm in the process of uploading the rest of the Kerkesner photos onto the Alphaholics page on Facebook, but it'll probably be a while.

Major Burns, You Owe Me a Helicopter

2009-07-25T00:15:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from conversations after arriving home last night at 8:10 (or, in the words of half the bus, "eight-freaking-ten"):

"Yes, Mom, I'm back. Just got in . . . no, it's fine, just turned my phone back on--thanks for checking in . . . no, only a little beat up . . . yes, I'm going dancing tonight--it's Friday. I was just getting in the shower now . . . no, not that stinky anymore--I did shower last night . . . just want to spackle my face and look like a woman again . . . holy cow, where did that bruise come from?. . . ."

"Hey, baby, I've missed you."
"I've missed you, too."
"What happened to your wrist?"
"Oh, um, well, they zip-tied me. And it was already kinda scraped from hiding in the woods in the dark from the guys chasing us with M-16s. It's okay, really. It only hurts when something touches it. Baby, is everything alright?"
"That was not the answer I was expecting."

"Are you coming to IHOP after?"
"Yeah, I've been eating MREs for two weeks. I could use something that hasn't been in a package for ten years."
"They don't make Hawaiian pancake MREs?"
"Please don't give them any ideas."

"You were doing what again?"
"Wait--I have pictures. My camera's in my purse . . . hold on . . . here."
"What did they do to you?"
"Fragmentation wound to the right cheek with facial bone fractures. Here, I'll zoom in."
"It healed so well."
"Yeah, mostly. There's still a bruise. Here, let me show you one of Jaime."
"Her eyeball's hanging out."
"But look how happy she is playing cards."

If Thou Shalt Endure It Well...Thou Shalt Triumph Over Thy Foes

2009-07-24T05:37:00.000-07:00

For a few years between undergrad and medical school, I would use a week of my vacation to volunteer as a tent/cabin "mommy" at a camp for teenage girls. Besides making sure they didn't kill themselves or each other on dutch ovens or ropes courses, my job was to eradicate spiders and bees, sing them awake in the mornings, and keep a close watch on group dynamics and morale. Every night before lights out, I would stop by their tent to take a group pulse and teach them something useful.

It is usually the nature of the beast that when the end of the week is in sight, the girls get antsy. Skin gets thinner. The complaints bubble to the surface. Offenses are given and taken. Crabbiness can spread like an epidemic. One year, to head this off at the pass, just beyond the mid-point, our nightly pow-wow was on the difference between enduring and enduring well. Fourteen-year-old girls can be rather sharp. They know the difference between dragging themselves to the finish line and charging triumphantly through it. They just need to be reminded that they're capable of charging, and that that is what we expect of them.

I am proud to say Alpha Company charged to the finish line. The USUHS motto is "Good Medicine in Bad Places," and Fort Indiantown Gap-Jazzeristan, Pennsylvania was definitely a bad place today. The Jazeeris have been attacking almost non-stop. I lost track of the number of us who have been shot and blown up. I hate it when they blow me up. But time after time, we took it like the Marines we were pretending to be (except for the screaming and freaking out), and the MS-4s brought us in, sorted us, treated us, and sent us back out (even though we never seemed to last long without getting hit again).

The days have started to blend together. I started the morning with a fragmentation wound to my cheek, with blood dripping into my mouth and nose and interfering with my airway. A lot of what I've learned from this exercise is how much I don't know yet about pharmacology. Because there were holes all the way from the inside to the outside of my cheek, they had to give me a huge antibiotic cocktail to keep the bacteria from the oral mucosa (mostly strep) and skin (mostly staph) from infecting the exposed tissue between the two. Then I went into surgery, where a series of mannequins and mannequin heads proxied for me while the MS-4s practiced intubations and the senior surgeon taught us how to construct a "hot pocket" to prevent hypothermia while air-evacuating me.

But soon I was back again for sick call with a nasty case of cellulitis on my leg, having tripped on a tent stake and scraped my skin a week before. Because I couldn't walk, I couldn't be returned to duty. While I was waiting to evacuate, some Jazeeri nationals (who bore an uncanny resemblance to Marion Keehn, Drew Hill, Sameer Saxeena, Amanda Elam, Amy Alexander, and some of the staff NCOs) approached the EMED camp and began to hurl rocks and sticks at our perimeter security. At first I was a little disappointed with the force with which the security guards threatened them, given that their claim that we needed were the ones who were trespassing in their space was kinda valid, but who's to say that none of them would have flipped out and just pulled out a weapon and started shooting. And then one of them did, absolutely validating the security guard's forcefulness.

These attacks sometimes mean that the ambulances end up bringing in injured Jazeeris, like Muoy Lim and Liz Miller. Just when they seemed to have the PJF attacks under control so they could go about their work of patient care again, we heard the screech of a rocket and suddenly there was a cloud of purple smoke. "Gas! Gas! Gas! Notional MOPP four! Notional MOPP four! I love this stuff!" Apparently mice got into the fourth years' MOPP gear in the warehouse, so they are just simulating the gas masks and charcoal suits this week.

"Notional" is fourth-year speak for "faking it," sometimes because it wouldn't be appropriate for them to insert real IV lines into fake patients, and sometimes it's because they're low on real-world litters or other supplies, and sometimes because they're too lazy or uncreative to go through with the real thing. For example, when Tyler Powel ran head-on into one of the BAS stations, the tiny security guard whose perimeter he had just breached yelled out "I notionally tackle you and zip-tie you," which seems more than cheating.

I had finally gotten released to go back when tragedy struck again. I was riding shotgun in a Humvee that John Roman was driving with Blair Laufer and Tara McClusky in the back when we spotted a groundhog crawling out into the road. John Swerved to miss it and ran into an IED. I was thrown from the vehicle and landed on my femur, which snapped and poked through my skin. Tara's arm broke her fall, also snapping on impact. Blair's injuries were all internal, but John landed on his forehead and developed a closed-skull fracture. The leg hurt (until they gave me morphine and fentanyl), but what began to terrify me was that I couldn't feel my foot anymore below the break. I did not want to lose my leg and go pirate and I let everybody know about it. I warned them about the insidous groundhogs in this country that are used to lure Humvees into IEDs. After being shot three times yesterday, to be blown up today seemed just too much. But the surgeons finally successfully reduced my fracture and put on an external fixator and gave me real-world peanutbutter cups (to help me understand for what we were fighting in the first place). While I was waiting for my evac to Landstuhl, I saw that Robbie Wetzler had been brought in, having lost his eyesight, and that Fred Nielson had been hit in the forearm and was spurting blood from his artery. And poor Scott Story--his whole head was bandaged when I saw him being carried past.

By the time I finally returned to duty, we were all preparing for the next big attack--the one expected to take out a huge number of casualties. Moulage covered my arms with abrasions--scratches from my pet tiger who was scared and attacked when the car bomb went off. Poor Meg Ginn was just a mess, but that didn't stop her from picking a fight with Anthon Lemon, who had gone completely off his rocker. I saw a gunshot on Kevin Gray's chest and worried if they would get to him in time. Fred Nielson was burned all over his face and arms--another Darth Maul impressionist. It was Liz Miller's bowel that eviscerated tonight, and Nicole Baker and Jamie Piercy whose eyes fell out.

It would have been incredibly demoralizing to have so many of us hurt or crazy, but then they sent something guaranteed to boost our spirits--reinforcements from Bravo Company, recently returned from their Kerkesner deployment. It's hard to describe what it was like to see them again. During the week of Kerkesner, our platoons had grown so close, like family. It's hard not to love someone who's had your back in a firefight, who's confided in you what the MRE did to his system this morning, who's lifted the side of the litter across from you to help bring a critically ill patient to definitive treatment. We are indeed a band of brothers now. Then, during Bushmaster this week, we'd shared car wrecks and explosions and borderline psychotic episodes and bullet sprays with other members of Alpha Company, and the family expanded to include cousins.

It was nice to have a platoon of Bravo join us, and we hugged and laughed and exchanged stories. But, having not been by our side during these critical times, they were on the outside of this net we had woven connecting each other, and they were now part of their own, separate net. I hadn't expected the distance to feel so palpable. The reunion moment gave me a Hemingway-esque glimpse into the surrealness of returning to regular life after war. Would the outside world have any sense of what we had done, of the import of what we had accomplished. I mean, who's even heard of Jazeeristan anyway? It gets, what, two Google hits? Three, maybe? We weren't even sure of the meaning of everything we'd done.

Still, we piled ourselves and our stuff into vehicles and shipped to the mission site. Even knowing we would sustain massive casualties, we were still jovial, singing classic Willy Wonka songs and joking about bringing on "notional" sunshine. It had already started to rain. A thunderstorm approached. It took one boom of lightning for the NCOs to order us back into whatever vehicles could be found, and I found myself sardined on a bench in the back of a canvas-covered Humvee, clinging to a roll-bar with Jesse Giffhorn on my lap. Never mind that we had done our SERE training and forded streams in worse than this. The vehicles raced to the barracks, deposited us in the motorpool, and headed off. I was placed in charge of eight fourth-year women and bringing them to the female barracks.

In just over an hour, the lobby of our barracks was filled with female faculty and support staff, all the MS-4 and MS-1 women who had been at Bushmaster (the fourth-years not even having material from their tents), and the MS-1s who had been brought back up from their tents at Kerkesner. A game of Catchphrase began in one corner, with participants still sporting their dangling moulage eyeballs and gunshot wounds. Hearts began in another corner. A few MREs were opened. Phones popped out and texts were passed. Arrangements were made to loan pajamas and shower sandals to those who had had to run to buses from the Kerkesner site, and I discovered how wonderfully fortuitous it had been that I had packed along a large box of the Crest single-use pre-pasted rubber toothbrushes.

And we were camp girls all over again--muddy, sticky, bruised, sore, uncomfortably crammed together, and laughing our heads off, ready to be sent out again into the rain and car bombs for a delayed or modified mass-cal. Charging to the finish line.

In the end, they brought the finish line to us. The mass-cal was called off. Someone arranged for new bays of the barracks to be opened for everyone to hunker down for the night. We started rotating through showers and packing. The cooperation came swiftly and purposefully, without whining or resistance. And then came sleep.

I can't believe how early morning came. Bravo had to take off, as did those who had been drafted to clean the actual Bushmaster site, so people started moving around in the room sometime just after four. We waited until five, then rolled out of bed, prepared ourselves, and started cleaning the barracks.

As I was making myself light-headed mopping the men's bay, the line from Richard Lovelace's poem To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars kept cycling through my mind: "I could not love thee, Dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more." We've been kinda shameless in our campaigning for honor platoon, but the promised reward seems to have progressively shrunk. Last fall, it was a ride home early from Kerkesner in a helicopter while everyone else cleaned the camp and barracks, and then all we could drink at Guapos. Then the promised helicopter bumped us off the schedule and was withdrawn. And here we are, wiping and dusting and sweeping and mopping and scrubbing and waxing barracks. Admittedly, he hasn't officially announced honor platoon, but from what we can acertain, all six platoons are currently cleaning.

And I don't even drink.

So what in the world was I doing this for? "I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more." Certainly we were not gunning so hard for this for the praise of our peers, and, as much as we enjoy the admiration of Major Burns, that alone would not suffice. Which leaves a few options. My theory is that by now we're in it for each other, and, perhaps, in it for honor in the sense of knowing we gave it what we had. I pulled a Humvee with all the strength my quads had. (I know that because I pushed them to the point of involuntary failure.) I think all along the way we've seen windows of opportunity where we could have backed off, could have endured without enduring well, and what stopped us was not wanting to do that to the rest of our platoon because they were doing the same for us.

In the words of Dan Bailey, "It's not only been an honor, guys, it's been a pleasure."

And the Carnage Continues

2009-07-22T20:49:00.000-07:00

Being in the field does funny things to people. I started the morning with a bloody nose, and the discovery that the drippy moulage blood tastes like peppermint when it seeps down your septum and into your lips. In related news, Tyler Powell started the morning with broken fifth metacarpals, almost exactly like Major Burns's during train-up week. It was rather unfortunate that we had to report to the same sick call, but at least Jaime Piercy, who had woken up unable to see, was there between us to distract us at first. By the time we arrived at the EMED, even that was unable to keep us apart, and we started to fight again. I probably called him some names that I would have regretted in the future, except that he deserved them. By the time the MS-4s running the EMED had pulled us apart and restrained us in zip ties (not an easy process, I assure you), my nose really needed attention, so they brought me in for an eval. Pressure didn't stop the bleeding and I squirmed too much for silver nitrate, so they had to un-cuff me to lie me down and give me IV morphine. Which was a bad idea because as soon as I laid down, the blood started filling my throat, and I started coughing and choking, a hacking fit so violent that I currently have a real-world bruise on my cheek from hitting it against the metal side of the litter. They finally sedated me (that seems to happen a lot on this deployment), anesthetized me, and cauterized my bleeding septum. It came out in the history that I was taking enormous doses of asprin to control headaches, and no amount of pressure would have made my blood clot. Also, that Tyler and I were fighting because he had slept with my boyfriend and I had threatened to out him. And we were battle buddies, too. The traitor. The punk. I can't believe he would do that to me. Even the morphine didn't really get rid of my rage, though it did take the edge off. Apparently such skirmishes were happening at sick calls all over the deployment that day.

I wasn't back on duty long before I was thrown from an exploding car and sustained a closed-skull fracture. It looked so horrible that the medics left me for expectant the first four times someone passed by me. They even left with the ambulances with me still on the ground. Nobody even bothered to examine me--they would have found me responsive to at least painful stimuli. So I had to break role and start screaming to get their security guard to notice he had left me, and then go back into my mostly-unconscious state.

It was the kind of day that reminds you of the Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times." Loren Walwyn-Tross was attacked by ninjas who almost killed him had he not been able to stumble into the BAS with the ninja star still embedded in his forehead. Later on in the day, I found his face spattered with bullets. Seamus Cobb got circumferential burns all across his torso, mere hours after an explosion that blew open his skull so bad that brain matter and bone were sticking out. The same explosion knocked out my hearing, forcing me to yell all communication to the doctors and their assistants. The burns got Dan Brennan and Scott Story also. An unexploded ordinance, part of Marion Keehn's rogue model rocket project, embedded itself in Robert Fenequito's head, which forced his eye to dangle out its socket by its nerve and artery. He was barely back at work when an explosion burned him all over the face. Kevin Gray lost an arm and had to go all around the woods looking for it. I still don't know what happened to the arm Greg Nishimura lost. Frances Rosario got an open fracture to both her radius and ulna. Nicole Baker was hit by rectal bleeding, which looked pretty similar to Jaime Piercy's exploded bladder. Dan Bailey's foot was badly mangled. Chris Oching was impaled with a chest. I was shot in the left chest on two separate occasions, once leaving me with a tension pneumothorax that took three decompressions and once leaving me with an open pneumothorax that became a tension pneumo once occluded. I was gasping from the time they appeared within hearing distance until they finally successfully treated me and just the hyperventilation was making my arms and feet tingly and numb. Jesse Giffhorn's forearm was mangled. Tara McClusky's was in a different car accident, which snapped her forearm, leaving a huge bone sticking out. She took it better than Seth Olchese, who did the same thing. Fred Nielson, may he rest in peace, lost several inches of gray matter when his head split open. Liz Miller got cuts all over her face. I didn't get all the details, but the rumor is that she provoked whoever did it. Aubry also had cuts accross her cheeks. I never found out if the two were related. Muoy Lim lost a finger, as did Heather Scheibe. Robbie Wetzler, after remaining in tact all of yesterday, was peppered today with fragments of something all over his face and arm. And John Gillis--I'll miss him. By the time they found him, he was so red and black and blistered with burns that he looked like Darth Maul in his impressionist phase. Eric Abdul threatened to kill his commanding officer because he wasn't given emergency leave to deal with his encarcerated wife. Amy Alexander's arm was pretty much destroyed. Fred Nielson's OCD hit a stage where he wouldn't even go into the commander's office because of its decor; then to top it off, he was shot in the buttock. Andrew Fisher chose the wrong time to have his bowel eviscerated--right when all the rest of us were hit by a car bomb--so whatever chance he might have had to be evacuated within a reasonable window of time to save him was lost.

For forensic purposes, I documented many of these injuries photographically. It would be disturbing and beyond the bounds of good taste to make them available here, but, if we get approval from our chain of command, we'll try to set up a restricted, by-invitation blog or photo album for the photos that would be way too grafic to leave open to the public, and those who want to see will be able to just request to be given access.

There's only so much people can take before they start falling apart, especially when they're feeling like no one is attending to their needs. When the medic finally decompressed my first pneumothorax and I could breathe again, I started to cry, and crying became wailing. I didn't want to die. I was in pain. I didn't want to leave my baby, who needed her mama. I wished I had listened to my dad and joined the Air Force instead of the Marines. I didn't want to be in this horrible country with its horrible food where people kept stepping on me and shooting at me. I was sick of being shot and blown up. And I needed pain meds. Somehow, inexplicably, giving me pain meds always diminished the wailing and screaming.

We can feel the tension building. We're trying to keep up troop morale, but we keep getting injured, which then really beats on the morale of the medical staff. You can sometimes feel their agitation. There are rumors of more car bombs tomorrow. The smoke machines and Saving Private Ryan soundtrack that come on every time Jazeeris blow up cars make it even harder for them to come rescue us. By tomorrow, we might all reach our saturation point.

We hear word of political debates on whether or not we should still be in Fort Indiantown Gap, Jazeeristan, Pennsylvania. The public is suspicious that we always seem to think going to war is worthwhile when there are penutbutter cups involved. I don't know enough about the big picture to say yes or no. On one hand, a shortage in peanutbutter cups and subsequent spike in peanutbutter cup prices would send our economy into a vicious spiral. And it's really a peacekeeping mission. On the other hand, despite our best intentions, it's not even always clear they want us here.

Tomorrow should be very telling.

I Would Like to Thank the Academy

2009-07-21T20:41:00.000-07:00

That glorious sensation of clean from yesterday didn't last long. Yes, we have achieved a relative steady-state of non-stinkyness, but today we added a whole new level of mess--moulage. Moulage is French for "big, simulated-bloody mess."

Our mission for today was to get hurt. And sick. And unstable. And occasionally die. All in the name of helping the rising MS-4s practice how to deal with hurt, sick, unstable and dead people. We bussed out to the central moulage site and deposited our stuff on a series of cots under the holding area tent. We then dug through old donated cammies and each found suitable ones to evolve into bloody messes. I pulled a set of soft green Marine digies belonging to someone named Evans that looked a little bit like pajamas on me. Command Central, starring Tim Gotham, Rebecca Hardy, and Mike Cullen, would recruit us in teams of two to eight, and hand us all cards with a set injury or illness on them, including relevant medical history, precipitating factors, vital signs, and what would reasonably be expected from an MS-4 treating us. If that injury involved diarrhea, out popped a baby suction bulb and some carmel-colored dyed applesauce. If the injury involved a scrape or fragmentation wound, out popped the scar wax and small silver wads of gum wrappers. If the injury involved an arterial bleed, out popped an IV bag with a control valve filled with super-saturated red cool-aid. Then Ben Nye make-up, fresh scab, and stage blood were layered on for color blending.

But, really, an injury is only as good as the Oscar-caliber theatrical performance behind it. Which was why I was terribly disappointed that my first card was to report to sick call with ear pain and itching. But then the first set of MS-4s upon whose camp we were assigned to stumble were dreadfully disorganized, having just arrived and set up their gear when Nicole Baker with back pain, Jen Nuetzi with blaster diarrhea, Anthon Lemon with an asthma attack, Kevin Gray with alcohol-induced gastro-esophageal reflux, and I arrived on the scene. Their lack of organization slowed them down, and in short order our whining had escalated. They were still in the process of slowly attempting to effectively treat our maladies when Loren wandered up with two large bleeding wounds on his shoulder to report that he, Jaime Piercy, Andrew Fisher, and Tara McClusky had been badly injured in a firefight. Nicole and I had already turned up the griping big time because of the wait, but this time we saw our chance to put something Oscar-worthy on the table and tried to run to Loren and help our friends. They tackled me. It took two of them. Anthon would have helped me out if he weren't in the middle of his asthma attack. On top of the huge collection of meds they had already given for my ear, they sedated me and strapped me to a litter. By the time the ambulance came to pick up Anthon and me, they realized that they couldn't give away a litter to send me, so they lowered the previous dosage of sedatives until I was capable of walking. Which meant I was conscious enough for another round of freaking out when the ambulance landed at EMED. There, they seemed to have a little better idea of how to calm down a hysterical patient (or, at least, in my Method acting, I wanted to calm down because of their treatment of me, whereas the other group's had only encouraged me to escalate). Finally, they just let Anthon come and keep an eye on me, until headquarters demanded we be evacuated and returned to come be patients again.

I was quickly turned around into the moulage station, where a series of gum-wrapper foil fragmentation wounds were waxed into my shoulder and covered in stage blood. Yummy. Chris Oching had been similarly pelted, Andrew Fisher was burned all over his face and hands, and Anthon was hit in the calf. Our scenario was that we had been caught in a firefight, and were found on the battlefield. Vivina McGintley won the Oscar on that one with massive abdominal injuries. I have to say, after all our tactical movement work last week, the MS-4s come off as pretty pathetic at it. They didn't have much of offensive line, so Anthon and I, as marines, kept asking for a weapon after our initial care under fire so we could get back in the fight and fend off the punks who had attacked us. Finally, one of the MS-4s gave Anthon his rubber duckie (a big no-no), and another one gave me a 9mm caliber stick. While they ran around like crazy trying to litter-carry ambulatory patients, we fended off hostile action closing in. But as soon as they brought me back into the camp in my triage area, someone who had been on the staff at the morning's sick call took away my stick-gun because she thought I was way too unstable to be carrying one. Which left no one guarding 180 degrees of their perimeter, a fact that upset me a ton more than it upset them. My bleeding wasn't serious, so they put a clean dressing over it and gave me morphine and a pre-emptive low-dose sedative--this time not taking any chances. They didn't sedate Chris, but he also would have grabbed any weapon lying around to pull security had he had the chance.

This time, I was evacuated back to the moulage tent get a skull fracture, with drips of blood oozing beside my nose and down my cheeks and eyes. Our Humvee had hit an IED and I was thrown from the vehicle onto my forehead. With pupils dilated and unreactive, I had a hemorrhage compressing my midbrain, and had no chance of ever regaining consciousness. They triaged me as expectant and got to me last. I have to say, the secondary survey the first medic performed on me included a whole lot more hands on breasts than the one we were taught. I was torn between staying in character within my coma and reminding him that he'd already checked there. A lot. Since I was the only patient left, they intubated me, but not until after a relatively long ethical deliberation. But once intubated, then they had to deal with me, so they sent over the chaplain, who kept trying to give me a poncho. After last week, the little trickle of rain was hardly even worth noticing. He then quizzed me--in my comatose state--about what the process is to return the body of a fallen American serviceman to his or her family. "What do you make sure to include in the bag with the body?" "Air freshener."

When I was finally evacuated, I came back to find that Anthon had been sent to the real-world medical tent because he was having a reaction on the tops of his feet to the make-up remover solvents. I grabbed his stuff and Sergeant Flores and I escorted him back to the dorms. Even though I came back in time for my next assignment--loss of hearing subsequent to a cold--they had already passed it on to someone else, so I got...arterial bleeding. Yay! A spurter, with it's own little squeeze-activated release mechanism. It also came with the bonus of altered mental status. This time, rather than belligerent, I went with loopy. It didn't make them freak out nearly so much. They got a tourniquet on me right away, and were the first of three groups to see me bleeding who actually bothered to cover the wound. In a series of progressively more pleasant and competent MS-4s, I was swept up through triage, initial eval and treatment, and orthopedic surgery, which was held in this beautiful inflatable clean plastic tent.

Here at Bushmaster, they seem so much more paranoid about our safety than they were at Kerkesner--we aren't to walk through the woods without chem lights and k-pots in the dark and they are attempting to enforce hydration. And then they go and pile sixteen of us on the back floor of an unmarked white van to drive on a highway. They are also beyond paranoid about making sure they have an accounting of every body on the exercise, having us check in and out of every area we use. One gets the suspicion they've lost people before. One also mourns a little that we can't have Major Burns running this by our year--he would remember to treat us like grown-ups, and would not let us get away with some of the slackage we've seen.

After my post-op evacuation, I had a few minutes to scarf some food before I was at it again, this time with a dry cough. That one was painful to simulate, and doing it too much brings on dizziness. The faculty and fourth years kept coming back to me to tell me I could drink water. Jen got bloody diarrhea, Seamus Cobb had a spontaneous pneumothorax, and Brian Pomerantz got to attack somebody. We could see how the length of the day was beginning to wear on them. It's been kinda fun to listen to the dialogues between the faculty and students about best course of action with our various complaints. It makes me excited to start getting into Pharmacology and Pathology and clinical rotations, and not just so we can show them up in two years.

When we arrived at the barracks, there was a mad rush for the showers. We're not quite ready to sacrifice that whole clean thing so quickly just yet.

On the Jungle Gym

2009-07-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

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.

Photos, Kerkesner Day 6

2009-07-20T12:33:00.001-07:00

Man Who Says It Cannot Be Done Should Not Interrupt Man Doing It

2009-07-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

Today was the Alphaholics last day on the Kerkesner side of our adventures. We awoke after the sun, packed up our stinky clothes, and scarfed down another MRE for breakfast. It's Sunday, and the chaplain was holding a non-denominational Christian service. I often find such things generic to the point of being unsubstantive, but this one was direct and uplifting. It was odd to be the only soprano voice over a crowd of basses and tenors. The seven of us Mormons in Alpha Company escaped into the bleachers for a few minutes in the afternoon to do sacrament. I have to admit, with the schedules we have been keeping this week, it has been difficult to find time to nurture myself spiritually, and the lack of that has been somewhat draining. It's not like we don't have lots of quiet time, but the kind of reflection that goes on when crouched over an M-16 in a security halt is often of a very mundane, trivial nature and usually involves wishing there were some more comfortable position in which to be crouching.

Jason Baumann and Eddie left us in the morning for an OEMS course in England. I found myself almost choking up as we said good-bye.

Our mission for the day was to defeat the other platoons. Like most missions, it began with a lot of standing around, waiting for the people on top to tell us what in the world was going on. We were still pretty high off of yesterday's triumph in the Battle of Day Five, so even when we heard the events--rifle disassembly and assembly, a patient carries relay, a Humvee pull, pugo sticks, grapling, and an MRE eating contest--it couldn't kill our mood.

We started out with a bang--Nicole Baker had disassembled her rifle and run almost three-quarters of the way down the track where Ian McDougall waited before Heather Scheibe and Jeanie Gorlin even started running. I had been a little worried when we saw how long the run was because Nicole's feet are so inflamed she hadn't been wearing shoes for the past almost twenty hours, but she still managed to blast ahead. From the far end of the road, Ian, Brian Pomerantz, and Tim Gotham waited, trying to see who had taken off. The three were convinced at first that it was Jeanie, because of how fast she was running. When they saw it was Nicole, the other two go out of the way and Ian prepared to sprint it. His rifle assembly was smooth and even, and the blank fired into the air sealed our first victory, with Brian coming in second.

The relay was an absolute killer--one huge lap around the road loop with the first quarter a buddy fireman's carry, the second quarter a fireman's carry with roles reversed, the third quarter a litter carry, and the fourth quarter a litter carry in gas masks. All of this in full helmets at noon on a dusty road. Kevin Gray, Dan Bailey, Marion Keehn, and Loren Walwyn-Tross represented Alpha Three Platoon. The run was absoultely brutal--they kept a pace that was hard for me to follow with the camera, even without taking on the weight of an extra real or fake body. Most of the platoon paced with them, cheering them on and absolutely winding ourselves in the process. The first platoon to arrive at the gas masks for some reason left their litter and mannequin, so the next did the same, and the third. Major Burns had specifically not wanted anyone sprinting in gas masks and was ticked that his instructions weren't followed, so the entire even was thrown out.

Next came my event--Humvee pull. Four men and four women, two ropes with hooks, pure bruit strength. But, dude, what other medical students can pull a Humvee fifty meters up a hill? We had Steve Colonna and Lucas Groves in front, followed by Amy Alexander and Alicia Scribner, then Dan Raboin and Jeff Strich, then Jaime Piercey and me. It took absolutely everything my little chicken legs could give to make any progress, and they began to fatigue really quickly. When our bodies crossed the white line, my foot grip began to slip, and they came out from under me a foot before the back of the Humvee crossed the line, just enough to scare everybody except me, who knew I could roll out of the way just fine and was just grateful I hadn't taken anyone else down with me. We missed first place by two seconds.

Then came pugo sticks, first to five hits. A coin-flip gave Nicole a buy for the first round, and Jeanie Gorlin battled with Alli Brinker. Mostly, Brinker just hopped around her, both playing defensive and not actively engaging, but eventually, Megan drew her in and defeated her. Seamus Cobb beat Greg Nishimura soundly, because, well, Seamus is awesome and has a little Tasmanian devil inside of him. Nicole started down against Jeanie, came back, but never fully recovered enough to beat her. I couldn't help but wonder if it wouldn't have been different had she been fresh. Seamus then proceeded to defeat Matt Brown, sealing in the second victory for the Alphaholics.

Next up were Liz Miller and Megan Ginn on grappling. I had absolutely underestimated Liz's viciousness when I had supposed that I might stand a chance against her. Holy cow. She got Megan to the point where she made gurgling sounds and stopped breathing, but Megan still wouldnt'tap out. A few ferocious scrambles later, and Liz was defeated, but not by much. Anthon Lemon represented us for the males, and started up against Mike Cullen. Now Anthon wrestled at the state level in high school, but he wrestled 103 lbs, and is currenly around 145 lbs. Mike cullen weighs about 235 lbs and has prior training in grappling and submissions. Anthon held his own, but after what seemed like an an incredibly long time, Mike finally had him in a position where he had to tap out. Megan then proceeded to defeat Frances Rosario and Mike defeated Ted Steelman, though, again, not soundly.

I don't even want to think about the MRE eating contest. That food is hard eough to choke down slowly. The entree was cheese and vegetable omlette. There were also scones and crackers and other horribly dry carbs. Robbie Wetzler and Fred Nielson didn't stand a chance against Matt Feist, who ripped off his shirt at one point and just snarfed and horked down the whole package, filled with water. Robbie snarfed but did not hork, and sometimes it came back up into the bag and he had to choke it down again. In his black warpaint, Matt was beyond ridiculous, spilling everywhere, like cookie monster, but then scooping it off the table and shoving it into his mouth. The level of disgusting was incredible. I never wanted to eat another MRE again. To pronounce his victory, Matt chased Major Burns to give him a big, wet, shirtless omlettey hug. Major Burns understandably ran. Fred was next to finish. Robbie kept trucking away, but at one point he looked around and made a mad dash to the woods to give it all back. We were proud of him for even trying. Has Jason Baumann been here, or maybe Dolo, they might have tried, but I really think Matt was pretty unstoppable at this.

After lunch, Major Burns held an award ceremony where we recognized the excellence of the cadre who had contributed to the successful week. I realized that the combination of my real-world gun bite and a bruise on my palm made it painful to clap, so I just hooted more. Major Burns read a piece about a special leadership award--an American flag--and what it represents and what it has been through. I was starting to tear up before he even finished explaining the award, and they started trickling down my face when he announced that it went to Steve Colonna. To me, there's no question that he deserves it--the smoothness with which he has run the platoon, the willingness to use the best that everyone has to contribute and to mentor and support to compensate for our weakness, the lack of desire for personal attention and glory--I've said before, but it's a joy and a comfort to follow his lead.

Then came the after action report and the buses bearing Bravo company. And then we loaded back onto the buses and left. For the next five days, we'll be at the barracks out in Bushmaster. An unsuccessful walk showed the shoppette to be closed, so we ordered pizza and Chinese, and settled in. I probably spent a half-hour in the shower. I couldn't get over how good it felt to shave my legs and actually touch my scalp. When I had to make a quick run to the garbage to throw away a soaking band-aid, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I didn't even recognize my body--the traps were too tight, and there were bumps and bruises all over the surface of my body, and my hair had become a disaster.

Tomorrow, we take on a leadership reaction course and finally get to do laundry. And tonight I tuck a clean body into clean clothes in a clean bed. Life is wonderful.

ATTENTION BRAVO COMPANY!

2009-07-18T20:49:00.000-07:00

Major Burns has requested that you not read this blog at all until the exercise is over. There are too many friends, family, staff, and alumni readers for us to simply restrict the privacy settings for that long. Please don't cheat your own experience and that of your classmates. Thank you.

Kerkesner Photos, Days 4-5

2009-07-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

My camera isn't great at low-light, but sometimes that makes for interesting special effects.

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

2009-07-18T20:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, July 17th, 2009, I beat Amy Alexander at something. I could just stop the entry right there and feel totally fulfilled.

But there's much to report. Including the fact that I beat Amy Alexander at something. I had Febreezed my both my sweaty uniforms the night before and hung them to dry overnight. In the morning, they both smelled like stink, but one smelled less like stink than the other, so I went with that one and felt rather less-than-fresh all day. I wasn't even attempting to wash my hair until I could get enough flowing water to get conditioner out.

Did I mention that I beat Amy Alexander at something? And it wasn't a dance-off. On Friday morning, we were Infantry Platoon, so we started the day in a joint training mission with PFJ forces in Combatives, learning how to beat each other up. I always found movies or video games about fighting or televised boxing or wrestling matches rather distasteful. What kind of primitive, low-brow people would get a kick out of watching one person inflict physical damage to another person?

Unfortunately, my prejudices take an ego-beating when it comes to personally exerting physical force against somebody who could fairly exert comparable or greater force back. I felt silly practicing parries and jabs and uppercuts in little drill lines, but put a foam-covered jousting stick in my hands and I can't whack Nicole Baker enough. And I really like Nicole Baker. That just doesn't stop me from wanting to put an upper cross to her head so hard that she still feels it twenty minutes later. I do feel bad that she's still in pain twenty minutes later, but that doesn't diminish my desire to whack her a lot harder than she whacks me. I don't like her any less after she whacks me, and, as far as I can tell, she doesn't like me any less after I whack her, despite the headache.

I suspect part of this is that Nicole has a lot more muscle and solidity to her and is willing to whack me back, hard. (She beat me 3-1 in our first bout, but it was pretty comparable in our unscored timed one.) Jen Nuetzi would not have been nearly as much fun. She's too nice and wouldn't want to risk truly hurting someone, especially not for practice training. That's also why I made sure I was paired with Anthon Lemon again for the hand-to-hand combatives training in the sand pit. I get really useful wrestling corrections, usually in the form of, "No, wait, if you leave that open, I can just grab you here and wham! you're mine." Sometimes he demonstrates the whams. But, more importantly, Anthon knows I want to be challenged and is willing to push me until I decide that the pain is too much, not just until it looks like I'm in pain. Most guys would not do that for a female practice partner, even if they realized that was what she wanted, with the possible exception of one's little brothers. And usually I can get quite a bit of resistance in or even thwart or almost thwart the original intention. And I certainly won't stop resisting just because I can't win. He knows I'll make it clear where my limit is and that I intend to be "freakin' squirrely" (his words, not mine) until that point. The determination and aggression I feel in these moments sometimes feels rather foreign to me.

As a platoon, the Alphaholics pretty fired up and had no problems inserting gratuitous battle cries into everything, but even so I was surprised at how many people were willing to truly, hard-core go at it and pummel their friends. Ensign Jaime Piercy and Ensign Tara McClusky were one of the big didn't-see-that-one-coming stories, furiously whacking for kidneys and head as those of us in line shouted "Go Navy!" Seamus Cobb held up respectably well under Jason Baumann. Catherine Imes made a much better match for Jen than I would have, given that neither of them has particularly killer instincts.

I was wearing the uniform that had flack-vest sweat and paintball splatters, as opposed to the one that had charcoal all over it and MOPP-gear level perspiration, and had kinda assumed I was mostly done with making huge messes of them for the week. Maybe I was just fooling myself that any of these agendas would be non-messy. But I should have taken for granted that rolling around in the sand would cause a whole new kind of wardrobe issues. I didn't even begin to understand chafing until I got sand caught in my waistband. And under my collar. And in my wrists and up my arms and pretty much anywhere that the sturdy, unyielding fatigue fabric could press against my skin. When I added the weight of load-bearing equipment and a Camelbak all stacked on top of fabric on top of sand on top of skin I was getting an exfoliating treatment to which only true skin-masochists would submit themselves.

After drilling various escapes and maneuvers to attain control of one's attacker, they had us come out into the pit with someone of comparable size and strength to battle one-on-one. Now, Major Burns showed us video footage of some of these bouts early in the spring, and my immediate reaction was intense, visceral anxiety. I tried mentally to go through who might be willing to help me practice and train on them because I couldn't imagine how my normal workout routine would address the fitness needs of such a bout. Roommates? None are really my size, nor the wrestling types. I gave them the heads-up that I might be practicing on them at some point because the idea terrified me. I began considering the women in our class slightly differently, as potential hand-to-hand combat foes. They wouldn't put me against someone sturdy like Nicole or Alicia Scribner. I finally settled on the idea of Liz Miller. I've got a little weight on her, but she's in better shape. Liz has a special relationship to Chuck Norris, so I was a little wary about the whole deadly Texas Rangering skills I hadn't gotten around to acquiring. But in the moment of decision, I looked at Liz, she caught my eye, and then Aubry Waters was standing right next to her. Which left me with Amy Alexander.

This feels like a joke where someone gives the punchline away prematurely. That someone would be me. And there really were some true epic battles between other people, too: Marion Keehn versus Seamus Cobb, Anthon Lemon versus Eddie Dolomiesewiescz, Dan Bailey versus Loren Walwyn-Tross. But, really, beating Amy Alexander at a physical competition is probably one of the athleticism highlights of my life, a triumph of pure freakin' squerreliness over strength and skill. Also, an exercise in drool control. How anyone gets used to mouthguards is beyond me.

When they ran the after-action report, Ian McDougall suggested they use recycled tires to prevent the after-chafing, or at least move us to the grass. But, really, Jello would be better. Pudding would probably be optimal.

The Jazeeris are such interesting people. Most of the ones you meet face to face are friendly and helpful, even if they do get a little sassy about making us keep track of sensitive items. They know their stuff and try to communicate it at the highest level we can handle it. But then there are the Jazeeris who just want to kill you. Usually, they aim to kill but end up giving us a wound just serious enough to really strain our medical capabilities. Major Burns has proven not to be nearly the talisman of safety we originally suspected. In fact, there are times when I wonder if he isn't really working for the other side--he reliably seems to show up in time to watch us when our situation is about to go horribly wrong. It could be the JPF forces have just gotten that much more bold and are now willing to attack with him right there. I suspect he's a pretty high-value target for them, as evidenced by "mysterious" the disappearance of his precious faculty guidon yesterday, and by the fact that he's managed to survive this long, despite having critical strategic intelligence.

After lunch, we received a FRAGO that joint training would be cut short because a plane had gone down behind enemy lines and we would need to take the platoon out into the Jazeeri forest to bring them back. Jazeeristan has beautiful, lush forrests, and it would have been downright scenic and recreational to hike through them if we weren't constantly popping up and down and holding security positions for excruciatingly long periods of time and guarding against imminent attack. By order of central command, all three squad leaders were removed from their positions (rumors have it that there was a love triangle between Raboin, Bailey, and Scribner), so Jen Nuetzi became my new squad leader and Dan Bailey joined Charlie team.

It's kind of awkward getting new leadership. It always takes a little longer to figure out whom to look to for my next movement, and they just have a slightly less well-0iled flow. There was even a moment when I found myself yelling back at Nicole because Jen had told me directly to move up and Nicole wanted me to stay behind her. It occurred to me that I'm an officer, and I will be in charge of people some day, and how important it will be to be mindful of not putting them in a position where to obey one order they have to disobey another. Later on that night, while we were huddled together as a firing team, Nicole apologized for the tone of some of her commands this week. I reminded her that we knew it wasn't personal, that things needed to get done, and if it were personal, it might be worth bothering to get offended or upset, but really not even then since she was doing what we all knew needed to be done. It's comforting that we've developed this rapport with one another by now. We trust each other's judgment and good intentions, but we are also mindful of the very human comrades beside us.

The path to the pilots was marshy, and it had begun to rain lightly. A mist rising up gave the woods a wonderfully mystic tone--again, comforting if you weren't worried about some PJF punk hiding in that dense underbrush under the cover of fog, out to capture our pilots. The intel we were getting from above was confusing--various administrative halts we didn't understand. I made short work of a package of cookies. Just as we were approaching what looked like an enemy hold-up, we were ambushed and had to run through streams that went up to our thighs, splashing us to the waist. We found ourselves on a little island with the three pilots. Captain Lynch, a PFJ who had been accompanying us, called for our platoon leader. When Steve Colonna stepped forward, Captain Lynch gave him a gunshot to the chest. I was too busy suppressing fire on our northern perimeter to see it, but when I heard Dolo's booming commands for us to press forward, I knew that meant Steve had gone down.

But we are Americans, and we don't leave a man behind, including the pilot almost drowning in the stream. We charged off into the woods opposite the direction we had come to where the evacuation helo said it could come, with Bailey, Grey, and I pushing enemy forces back away from the litter teams and their precious cargo. But then we saw what lay between us and the loading zone: a quarter-mile up-hill climb. At a run. With litters.

Had you told me before I had started to run that that was where our objective was, with my legs cramping and my feet sore and my boots and pants soaking wet, I might have just looked for cover and started to cry. But I was already charging, so I charged. It was a good thing we had reviewed battle cries the day before; it really does help one's courage to scream and be scary. When we got to the LZ, the OpFor had retreated, and we were able to successfully evacuate our fallen camrades.

Our triumph didn't last for long. About a half-hour actually. Long enough for us to eat something. Then a PFJ training team showed up to demonstrate SERE tactics to us--Survive Evade Resist Escape. Except we weren't going to worry much about surviving and we had practiced resistance in the morning, so we were really just having E training--evading. It was a good thing, too, because as soon as he'd showed us the basics of moving and finding cover and disappearing, our platoon was ambushed again and just barely managed to escape, but we had lost each other and were completely out of ammo. We all survived the initial onslaught, but in our retreat, we had separated into three-man teams. I was with Dan Bailey and Steve Colonna--one of only two troops in our platoon who had had real SERE training before our Jazeeri deployment. To maintain light discipline, I took no photos so as not to attract attention of hostile forces.

Our sources told us that at 2100, a team would come to a certain grid coordinate just over a kilometer away to find us--all we had to do was get there and not get caught. Easier said then done, stuck behind enemy lines, with a force who knew we were out there. We sprinted for the first five minutes until we could find a temporary cover to pull our fatigues over our Camelbaks, pull out our compasses and map, and plot our way back to the pick-up zone. From there, we slowly and deliberately bunny hopped down, past the creek where we had seen the pilots, and up a hill. We could see other shadows in the woods, but it was impossible to tell if they were friendly or hostile, so we just hid from them and tried to avoid them if possible.
when we had reached a hiding point about two hundred meters from what we had designated to be our re-orientation point. Then we heard a noise. Immediately, we held our breath and got even lower to the ground. My fatigue blouse hadn't been able to button all the way when it was over my camelbak, so I found myself pressing into the wet leaves with nothing but a t-shirt between me and them, my compass poking painfully into my gut. But I couldn't risk reaching down to move it. Immediately I saw something--the red end of our M-16 barrel, blaring out our position. Like a flash, I reached my left hand up to cover mine and threw my right arm across Bailey's to cover Colonna's. Little spatters of rain confused us as to the direction the footprints had moved, but we knew they hadn't gone far. We heard a shot in the distance. It felt like an hour. I'm sure it was less. My arm began to tingle. My feet were getting cold. I inhaled and was surprised that, amongst all the woodsy smells and foul body smells, what reached my nose first was the smokey gunpowder smell of my recently-discharged gun, whose empty magazine and empty barrel could do little to help me now. And then I saw him--Ken Power, a notorious FJP fighter. He stood fifteen feet from the downed brush were we hid. I couldn't tell if we were making eye contact. I stopped breathing, again. It was growing dark--maybe he hadn't seen us. Then footsteps came from the other side.

BOOM! I could tell the granade had been thrown somewhere near us, but I hadn't felt it, so I didn't move. "Well, well, well, look what we have here, three sleeping on the job." I looked at Steve. He looked back at me, blinking. He hadn't moved. "They didn't pop up--maybe they dead." Yes, dead. That's what we were. They stayed for a while, laughing. We stayed for a while, playing dead. Then they wandered off, but we could tell they weren't far. I slowly shuffled a leaf over our red rifle tips so I could lower my cramping arm and shifted my weight off my diaphragm. slightly. The warmth of Dan Bailey crammed between me and Steve was comforting in the dark, wet, leaves. We waited. They waited. I could feel my shoulders cramp, my legs cramp, my neck cramp. Still, I couldn't shuffle. We would not be caught, not when we had made it this far.

Almost a half-hour later, we made our move, creeping thirty yards at a time, slowly, deliberately, staying in the thick cover. Eventually, we reached a recognizable terrain feature and began to follow it, adjusting to where we were just north of the primary trajectory to our endpoint. We could tell there were others in the woods, but not close. It was almost a straight shot the last 300 meters of the way, so we hunkered down about fifteen meters from the pick-up point with about fifteen minutes before the 2100 to 2130 window and waited. We could hear others coming to the area, too--probably friendlies that had been with us from the original firefight, but we couldn't take the chance to find out.

Our pick-up went seamlessly, and we rejoiced (quietly) from the (relatively) safe zone to find some of our comrades had been picked up at the same time. As more trickled in, the stories began to be passed back and forth. One group had been caught and received the Mark of Shame, a red sharpie line across the throat. Two teams were slightly later then the window, having detoured too far from their original azimuth to find their bearings again. We began to eat and to stretch out on the cold ground. But the final team did not come. And did not come. We tried calling them on the radio, just in case they had turned it back on because of an injury or emergency, but heard nothing. They sounded the "all clear" alarm. They sent out cars and small teams of friendly forces to search. Still nothing. The PFJ forces ordered us to sleep, as we might not have another chance for a while. Lieutenant Dolo ordered all prior service members to instruct the others in the platoon in how to spoon. I formed a body teepee with Jen and Seamus, which was warm but uncomfortable, so we finally just laid on the ground and cuddled. We began to worry about what might have prevented three experienced navigators--Aubri Waters, Loren Walwyn-Tross, and Nicole Baker, to find the pick-up point. At 2330, they sauntered in, wondering why no one had picked them up. Apparently, before our departure, Aubri had written the wrong rendezvous time, and the senior PFJ force officer in charge had reviewed her notes and approved them. They had been successfully evading the search party teams for two hours longer than the rest of us. Major Burns came to talk to us. Apparently, there are those within USUHS who thing we shouldn't even be in Jazeeristan, that we should shut Kerkesner down. They thought this whole exercise was too hard. If we felt that way, we could choose to not accompany the next day's mission and not receive adverse consequences.
Of course, everyone knew that if we really wanted to quit, administrative consequences wouldn't deter us. But if we were on the fence, voluntarily letting down one's team was worse than any mark of shame. I was shivering and wet and sore and exhausted, but when something is too hard for me, I will let you know. Until then, you pushing me is one of the only ways I get to see just how far I can go. My fellow Alphaholics were voicing similar sentiments, especially when we found out who within the University was opposing the exercise. We knew how to yell, we knew how to evade, we knew how to storm buildings and treat casualties and splatter each other with yellow paint, and Saturday, those PJF punks were going down.

We loaded the LMTVs, ran home, got naked in the tent with the sides still wide open to wet-wipe up the sand and mud from our bodies, changed into dry underwear and socks (which don't help all that much when your boots are soaking), and packed an MRE up for the next morning's mission. I had just pulled the zipper shut on my mosquito net when I heard Captain Lynch's voice ordering us to get up and in formation. Amid cries of "I can't find my pants," and "my boots are still soaking," we scrambled to the front of the tents. Dolo was still our Platoon Leader, and Sam Weiss was sent over to assist A1 and A2 platoons, but we added Sean McIntire. Some other platoon members were given the shuffle within the platoon, and Glen Olsen became my squad leader.

In short order we learned that our mission was to take out the PJF's leader, dead or alive. We could leave our MOPP gear and k-pots. It was still pitch black as we started a 1.9 km roadmarch from our drop-off point to the house where we had been briefed we would find him. Barely three minutes into the march, we received sniper fire from the left of the road mere feet from Nicole and me, but it was quickly and decisively suppressed. Nicole searched the dead casualties and found useful inteligence that would help us navigate better once we arrived.
The fireflies clumped together on leaves, giving the illusion of flashlights in the woods. Having marched on the right side of the road earlier, I didn't recognize the light towers alongside the left, and was constantly worried that they represented latent enemy forces. With the sky completely overcast, I couldn't see more two or three meters into the woods where there weren't towers. At one point, we received an administrative halt from above--we were outpacing the opposition forces and needed to give them time to set up.

Major Burns had offered us caffeinated gun before we departed, but I don't do caffeine. In the fog, it was almost as if I hadn't put in my contacts at all. I could feel the fatigue spreading through my head and body. I resented having filled my Camelbak so full. My feet tingled. We marched on. During one security halt, Anton squatted and took a descreet leak. We hoped we wouldn't have another stop shortly after so no one else would end up in the same spot. A firefly landed an inch from the barrel of my rifle and crawled under a leaf, pulsing.

We moved on. About a hundred meters from the point, we attempted to approach from the cover of the woods, but soon found that pitch-black woods on uneven ground was a safety risk not worth taking, so we went around on an improved side-road. When we were in sight of the house, we bounded to a new entrance tunnel.

This time, I was not going to let some bullet take away my turn to have fun storming the castle. We had been briefed by the previous castle-storming team of the layout of the tunnels, and were prepared to use maximal aggression. Glen Olsen, whose snap observation and decisive action in the tunnels had proved invaluable last time, was directing us. And I got to be on point. It was time to shut this puppy down.

When Dolo radioed the approval to go forward, we charged, guns blazing. We knew there might be hostages, so we didn't make the mistake this time of shooting anyone unarmed. What we didn't suspect was that Jessie Schoener and Aubri Waters, two of our own, whom we hadn't seen since they went off to have a spider bite and turned ankle treated, were being held in a lower room, hurt, but ambulatory and able to stand guard. Seamus, Sameer, and Bailey took one side and Lemon, Baker, and I took the other. We managed to successfully rescue all the hostages and neutralize their guards, but Baker was shot in the arm, and Sameer took a bullet through his arm into his chest. The second floor was only accessible through a hole in the cieling, so we threw a flash-bang in first and threw Anthon up to follow it, then me, then Bailey. A sassy prisoner was giving us some trouble, so we zip-tied him and had a support team haul him out. On my way to the roof, I hit my head on the cement cieling, wondering if maybe the "no k-pot" rule was really all that wise. When we got to the roof, we realized we would need to take down one more room. We called for another flash-bang. One of the PFJ coalition forces said that wouldn't be necessary. Bailey looked at him, lit it up, and said "I've already pulled the pin." In the chaos of taking the last room, I felt a stab of pain in my left buttock and realized I had been hit and was now pouring out copious amounts of blood.

I yelled for help, and Dolo, knowing my potential for hysterics, yelled at me to suck it up. A medic was quickly dispatched to treat me and a litter team of Steve Colonna and Dan Raboin were sent to carry me off. As Dan lifted me up by the straps of my Load Bearing Equipment, the barrel of his M-16 slipped and smashed on the top of my head. "Ouch!" Real-world pain. Again, I considered the wisdom of the k-pot judgment call this morning. As I got to the second floor, Raboin hoisted me over his shoulder in a fireman carry. As he turned to pass through a doorway, WHAM!, real-world pain again--lots--as my head collided with the door frame. (About sixteen hours later, I still have quite the painful. Whoever decided k-pots were optional was so fired.

It was decided that I would hop to the outside of the house, and would become officially non-ambulatory from that point. This time gun-free, Raboin scooped me over his shoulder and carried me to the casualty collection point, where Liz Miller the medic gave me a pressure dressing, a gauze wrap for my real-world head injury, and phentanyl lollipop/chemlight taped to my finger, to fall out on its own if I should accidentally overdose. While I was down, Keehn came by and gave me real-world Motrin--Vitamin M, which helped. We hadn't brought a litter, so I was to be carried the 1.9 kilometers back to the drop-off point where transport would meet us.
Marion Keehn started. As he lifted me up onto his shoulders, I could feel a sharp pain in the inguinal ligament area of my supporting leg and an overwhelming love. He would really do that for me? We made it to the treeline, where a magic fairy let me ambulate through the woods, to be lifted again on the other side. This time Steve Colonna took me. I have always respected Steve, but the admiration I felt for him then was so far beyond respect. Fireman carries are awkward for both parties, but one party has a choice of "I can take her" and the other party is told they will be taken. [I found out later that the cadre had intended for Amy Alexander, the lightest member of our platoon, to get this injury, but she had never been exposed to direct fire.] Each step pushed more and more into my groin, and I began to wonder if I would ever be able to have children again after this roadmarch. My legs and shoulders hurt, too, but not shooting nerve pain. I just don't have much padding there. I felt bad for being smelly and heavy and bony, but I felt more bad for me for having a nerve so close to the most useful leverage point for a fireman carry. The sunrise was beautiful stretching up over the trees. Occasionally, I would make Steve or Marion or Dan put me down to rotate me to the other side to save my thighs. They never complained, and, in fact, kept reassuring me that I wasn't a burden, that they had carried ruck sacks heavier than me, that they weren't hurting. Eventually, I asked to be piggy-backed. After a little while, I was pushing somewhere uncomfortable on Steve, so they rotated in Ian McDougall, who had played hockey for West Point. I jumped on to his back (with my good leg), hung on tight, and we were off. He charged forwards, passing so many squad members that the PL had to pull him back so he wouldn't get away from the security perimeter. I loved him, too. Ian and I had shared a cadaver, Trudy, through most of this year. There were brief moments then when I didn't love him--not many, but very real--and I felt humbled and guilty for having ever felt that way about someone willing to carry me for five hundred meters straight without a break. He said he used to train by doing squats with 125 lb sandbags. That's about me. It was a work-out for me, too, thigh-crunchers and shoulders, but nothing compared to what his quads must have been going through.

When we got to where transport should have been, it wasn't, so they had to carry me again, 300 meters uphill in the midst of enemy ambushes on both sides, all while guarding the three ambulatory casualties and the EPWs. After one particularly messy firefight had cooled down, someone called out "who's next for Sally?" and Matthew Hawks appeared out of nowhere. I hadn't even realized he was in our platoon. They must have put him in this morning. Hawks is the leanest of all the people who carried me today, but he picked me up effortlessly and was suprisingly comfortable. I never quite figured out what it was that made his shoulders dig into me so much less than the others'. He was just a platoon adoptee and didn't owe us anything, and had swooped in to take over the most physically demanding task of the group. He ran me through the perimeter of a BLS mobile medical set-up being staffed by the other platoons, and I was quickly rolled onto a stretcher and triaged. My real-word closed-head injury drew the most attention from the triage staff. Major Burns approached and asked the medic what my Glasgow Coma Scale score was if my eyes stayed closed, and I moaned but didn't withdraw to pain and gave no verbal response. I closed my eyes and moaned. They decided it was an eight. Major Burns asked what that meant. I helpfully pointed a finger down my throat. "Intubate." But they were under too much fire to do that in the field, so they triaged me as expectant, carried me off to an "expectant" pile, and dumped me off the liter. Marion Keehn came up and noticed me on the ground unconscious with a pile of other unconscious people and demanded to know what happened to a patient he had brought in as delayed. He had come with real-world indignation to rescue me from a strange medical team who did not realize that I was Sally, and I was not going down if my people had anything to say about it. Someone explained that my glasgow coma score had slipped to below eight, which meant I would need artificial airway assistance, and since they didn't intubate while under fire, that made me a probable goner. Marion pulled out a naso pharyngeal airway and inserted it, the second in two days, and very rapidly my GSC rose to an eleven, and then a twelve. He then demanded a litter and litter team to take me back to the BLS to be reassessed. They were a little surprised to see me again, but decided to go with it, and made me "urgent surgical," which meant I could be evacuated. Oh, thank goodness for Marion. What would we do without friends?

I have no idea. When the last patient was finally evacuated, while we were waiting for our real-world transport back to camp, Dolo went to the porta-john and some of the cadre came up to start shaking it. There was no way our platoon would let that happen, not to him, so Charlie team (Baker, Lemon, and I) charged up and established a perimeter around the porta-johns, keeping hostile forces at bay until his work in there was finished.

Back at camp, we formed up for a brief and somewhat confusing memorial service for three of our own who had fallen the night before--Lucas Groves from A-3, Ken Bull from A-2, and Kristen Cox from A-1. I kept expecting some sort of tie-in with this being the world we live in or the patients we treat or something, but they just never quite got to that part. It was rather confusing. We shed our stinky gear and changed into PT clothes, grabbed lunch, and began to air our our gear and take naps. After a while, we congregated again so those with experience could talk the rest of us through cleaning our weapons. What a messy, awkward process. It turned me off the M-16s even more. But it was hard to be grumpy as we sat around comparing bruises and blisters and other assorted badges of courage. In addition to my real-world head-wound, my shins are speckled with bruises, I have one the size of a golf ball on my bicep, and my hands and great toe knuckles are blistered and cut. A few minutes later, Major Burns arrived with music and pizza. We ate and dispersed, some to naps and some to cell phones and me to go wash my hair at the hygiene pit with my canteen. It wasn't super-effective, but it got out a lot of the gunk, and by tomorrow night we'll have real showers and beds. Tomorrow, we get to real-world massages. Stay tuned.

Photos, Kerkesner Day 3

2009-07-16T22:22:00.003-07:00

Apologies that we have had to adjust the privacy settings for OPSEC. I was not aware of how widely this was disseminating.

Boom Boom POW

2009-07-16T22:15:00.000-07:00

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.

Photos, Kerkesner Day 2

2009-07-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

We attempted a wireless adapter, but we haven't quite gotten the technology to work yet, so we're back kidnapping bandwidth to upload photos. Again, thanks for your patience.

Real-world Chafing

2009-07-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

There were no lights on in the camp last night when I returned, but the sky was bright with stars and fireflies flashed in the woods, making me a little paranoid about grabbing my wet wipes and clean underthings and ducking to the edge of our designated clearing to freshen without waking up the whole tent. I unzipped my little mosquito-net hut and wiggled into my sleeping bag. It took about two minutes to feel like I was on fire, so I scootched out of my pants, unhooking my blousing hooks and tucking them in my pockets. Still burning up. I lost the socks. Still warm, but with it zipped down to my waist, it was enough to sleep.

Sometime during the night, I woke up freezing. I pushed the Indiglo on my watch. One-thirty. My heart soared--I didn't have to wake up yet. The socks and the pants, still bunched in the sleeping bag with me, came back on, the zipper back up, and I only woke up once an hour after that, each time grateful for the stars and that real morning had not yet arrived.

The FRAGO for the morning was that we would be the medical platoon. The JPF had been making small-arms and chemical attacks on various peacekeeper outposts and our mission would be to treat any casualties that came. Which meant...MOPP gear. Normal cammies aren't the most agile of wardrobe choices, but the sturdiness suits the tasks required of them. MOPP gear is a whole different species of awkward. The outfit took up so much space in my bag that I had to put my MRE items for that evening's meal in my cargo pockets--a mistake I would come to sorely regret because, once I had added the extra layers of pants, there would be no accessing my chocolate banana muffin top, and, once the fabric alongside my skin was saturated with sweat, the stiff plastic packages of the MREs in my pockets only enhanced the chafing. And, oh, baby, was there chafing. Every double-reinforced seam became sandpaper against my stubbly leg hair, so that going up and down onto my knees and front to take a security post was an exercise in friction.

I began to suspect that the day's mission was designed as a test to see if all of our sweat glands work. Mine do.

But being medical platoon is so much more than just a sweating contest. First we built a one-room mobile medical center from scratch. Not sticks-and-mud from scratch, but pre-fab-poles-and-canvas scratch. I think the Army could learn a thing or two about modular, assemble-yourself furniture from IKEA. The image that came to mind as we pieced together the various sides and lifted and secured them into place, however, was not a Scandinavian furniture assembly party but Aaron Copland's "Rodeo," which was originally composed to accompany a Martha Graham modern dance piece about a community barn-raising. I felt like there should be a newlywed couple and their relatives do-see-do-ing around in the corner somewhere. Instead, there were NCOs in short-sleeved t-shirts looking cool and un-chafed telling us to hurry up, the casualties would be here any minute.

We paced out a landing zone for our medivac helicopter and assembled a decontamination station in exactly the wrong direction for the wind, which would have been exactly the right direction for the wind if the chemical weapons people used the same direction conventions as the rest of the military. We got to pull off our gas masks and huge rubber gloves to re-group for a minute, and then back on they went to move the decontamination assembly. At first, our patients were American soldiers who had been at the site of a chemical weapon plant explosion, but soon we began to hear of small skirmishes nearby and had to dispatch support personnel to suppress the attacks and retrieve casualties. All of this wearing an extra 20 degrees worth of heat and the dreaded gas masks and unbreathing Mickey Mouse gloves. Whenever our Platoon Seargent (PS--Papa Smurf) Loren Walwyn-Tross would come by to two-finger signal that we could remove our masks, I would three-finger signal back my deep abiding love for anyone bearing such happy news.

The will to live is incredible. Why else would someone design something so incredibly cumbersome and expect people to wear it for hours? I kept thinking about Iraq and the heat there and feeling guilty about being so ungrateful. In January or February 2003, some intellectual foreign policy bigwig whose name I don't remember now gave a convocation at my college in which he brought up what seemed at the time like an inevitable push for war. One of the things he mentioned was that, were we to go to war with Iraq, we had a very narrow window--really just a few months--to make that call, because of a very specific constraint: the Iraqi summer. At that time, many suspected Saddam Hussein to still have chemical and biological weapons stocks. It would probably not be humanly possible to wage a war during the Iraqi summer in chem and biohazard suits--our physiology is just not built for that temperature range. It's also rather embarrassing to attempt to look through one's rifle site while wearing a bulky mask, like a bug that just can't figure out the whole clear glass window concept. But, really, if you just stay perfectly still, you stop feeling the heat after a moment, a gift from your nervous system's adaptation response, a zen state where you're at peace with the pain.

Cookies are also really good for this. I found I was much more energized to crouch with my M16 beside a tree, being pulled on and poked by by various awkward bags, when I had just eaten something with high-fructose corn syrup and trans fats in a colorful wrapper with elves on it. Even the barbecue veggie burger, once I could finally access my pockets again, was a brilliant little rectangular loaf of textured vegetable protein that was outright palatable and surprisingly low-mess.

Major Burns stopped by as we were finishing the de-con and treatment of the last patient in the area. He's kind of a talisman of sorts--the enemy are too scared to attack as soon as he's around, but when he leaves, they pound on us with a vengeance. This time, we heard a few real-world bangs and saw a cloud of white powder and suddenly the whole site was contaminated and we would have to move the mobile medical center across the clearing. Luckily, we had trucks to help. So down went our Aaron Copland barn and de-con line, and every one of us had to be screened for contamination before we could cross the field. Then up went the barn again and we were back in business, treating various trauma patients from the other Alpha platoons and a few bandaged-up cadre who had been caught in various cross-fires.

Then tragedy struck. Five men in various levels of non-standard dress approached the perimeter where I was standing guard, claiming they had been victims of a suicide bomber. Only the one in the headdress spoke English, so we had them place their hands over their head and called for back-up to help us search and process them. The apparent leader kept asking where his wife was, and we said we couldn't help him. But five minutes later came a hysterical woman in a blue robe and black headscarf. When she wouldn't raise her hands but kept approaching, I yelled for a security detail to bring her husband, who also spoke English and could help us communicate with her. I was refused the first few times until finally we had a whole crowd with us to help with this one hysterical woman, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Sergeant Ernle. Finally we sent Nicole Baker forward to search her and me standing guard, assuming that two women would be less alarming. It flashed through Nicole's mind to grab her hands first, but by then it was too late. A flash of white cloud surrounded the woman, and she, Nicole, and I lay on the road. After a moment of unconsciousness, I became aware of a trickle of sweat dripping my sun and bug stuff into my eyes, which began to sting. I was alive, but my exposed face and hands had absorbed the blast wave and were covered in burns. I realized that my team didn't necessarily know I was alive, so I started yelling for help. And once you start yelling, you might as well proceed to full-on hysterics, especially when your face and hands are burned and you may have just lost your eyesight and you have no idea if your friend survived or not. The doctor examining me, however, needed to hear everything else going on, so I was given a sedative. As I lay there sedated on the stretcher, the word came out that I was magically healed and we were back to MOPP level zero. I don't know which was the greater miracle.

A new mission was coming, and it was starting to grow dark. We pulled down the whole barn assembly again and awaited further instructions. This morning, the coordinates given for us to find our mission didn't exactly correlate with where we needed to end up, but, when we arrived at the featureless treeline, a little bird came and retracted the original directions and suggested we might find our location if we aimed, oh, that way. Then this evening's directions required a few revisions as they came down, but essentially involved cramming ourselves tetris-style into a medivac vehicle and being driven out to some mystery point, from which we would carry a lot of bulky medical supplies down a road and through the woods. At some point, all three squads were supposed to meet up together and...no one quite filled us in on the final objective until after they had texted one another a few times, realized they dropped one group off at the wrong site, and we had all tramped back and forth across roads and creeks and rocks and mud and the path for some of the other groups trying to escape the SEER scouts stocking them. But the fireflies again contributed a nice paranoia-inducing touch, and it was fun to see that we could safely patrol swamps and woods that are way overdue for controlled burning and encounter non-enemies on the move while still maintaining a low profile. And, really, if it didn't involve some amount of low-grade confusion and terror and popping up and down when there's nothing about your body that wants to bend at all, much less quickly, it would be just another scout camp in MOPP gear with M-16s and suicide bombers.

Tomorrow we are the scout platoon.

Photos, Kerkesner Day 1

2009-07-14T18:36:00.001-07:00

We have travelled so far outside of civilization that there is no wi-fi. Instead, I am in the Tactical Operations Center, trying to sneak a handful of photos through their poor dial-up network line. I appreciate your patience.

Take-off

2009-07-14T18:09:00.000-07:00

Morning came too early. My body registered the darkness and the softness of my bed as I lay there, hand on snooze, negotiating with myself for an extension. Finally, my mind hit on a convincing argument to get out of bed--hygiene. I still had time for one last shower. Stink avoidance is a powerful motivator. As is one last real meal. Like many of my classmates, I've been trying to finish all my perishable food before we go, but I'd saved two eggs, a vanilla yogurt, and a cup of Amish blueberries to settle my protesting, sleep-deprived stomach.

It was stil dark when I arrived on campus, hunching under the weight of a pack that could have fit me. How in the world did I pack all this stuff? I felt like the only place I deviated from the list was in doubling the recommended underwear quota. Whoever thought three bras would last six days of field exercises until we could do laundry has clearly never worn them.

Most of the men had cut their hair super-short over break to decrease required maintanance and looked slightly smaller and more vulnerable with their extra exposure. Even with that, and beneath their enormous packs and camelbacks, I was surprised at how many of my classmates were distinguishable just by their silouettes--how a year of living in these conditions, sharing cadavers and Tom Smith's famous Monday morning chocolate bundt cake, makes it feel like we've been together forever. Well, maybe not forever. In fact, definitely not forever.

Hmmmm. The producer of the Lord of the Rings films is an alumnus of my undergrad. Sometime after the release of the third one, he came to campus and gave a convocation, in the which he described some of the massive logistical obstacles required in transplanting a whole city worth of set builders, make-up artists, camera workers, extras, and all the people required to feed and house them into the New Zealand countryside. He also described some of the special effects that had been designed specifically for some of the battle scenes in LotR. One of them was about computer-generating large armies of computer-animated soldiers that moved as individual entities within a larger movement. The trick was to start with a prototype skeleton and give it parameters in which to raise knees to lift feet to project leg motion forward to project body motion forward, etc., etc.. Then, once they had created this almost self-directing animated entity, they made the movements individual by tinkering with the dimentions, making small changes in the proportional heights of femurs to tibias or width of shoulders. Suddenly, rather than a uniform crowd, there was a sea of unique soldiers.

So this morning, in the shadows, it was striking that just by the tilt of a head, by a small wave, I could distinguish most of the class when it was too dark to actually see anyone's features. We've kinda become a part of each other by now. Our bags, however, do not have such obvious distinctions, and calls could be heard from various corners of "is this one my duffel?" and "if you see a helmet with a muffin in it, that's mine."

The sun was just beginning to peak out over the trees when we pulled off. The buses for Bravo Company would be late, so our platoon got a bus almost to ourselves. The ladies set to work immediately, Lieutenant Nicole Baker french braiding Lieutenant Alicia Scribner's hair tight enough to last a month and Ensign Jaime Piercey wrapping Lieutenant Jesse Schoener's hair into two similarly tight plaits. Somewhere in the process we developed a new hand-motion to refer to Marion Keehn, called the "french weave." I wanted to catch up on sleep, but my book was too gripping, and the AC of the bus was on way too high. Instead I got to hear alternating jelly fish stories. The newest addition to our platoon, Ensign Jason Baumann, added to our long line of Kerkesner aphorisms: "There's not really a difference between thirty jellyfish stings and a hundred jellyfish stings."

We drove through a mountain pass to arrive in the valley that is Fort Indiantown Gap-Jazeeristan, Pennsylvania. We're camped out at the edge of a rather large clearing, surrounded on all sides by woods that are high enough that we can't any terrain features beyond the immediate tree-line.

After some introductory yelling to get us in the mood, we assembled our tents, or rather, we all assembled someone else's tent, and then went around helping fix the last details. Our company of three platoons had six gender-integrated tents, filled to the brim with comfortably wide and sturdy cots and little personal misquito nets. After some shuffling to create a partition-able sleeping order, we put up Old Glory to add some color and a jury-rigged string of ponchos to be rolled down for changing and wet-wipe bathing.

Then came the M-16 issue. This is the first real gun I've ever touched in my life. If it were up to me, we really wouldn't have a second ammendment (but since it's not up to me, I respect that it's there). But I have to say, it was kinda anti-climactic. An M-16 is a whole lot like a fake M-16--heavy, awkwardly long, and kinda clunky-looking. I had read an article in the New Yorker maybe four years ago about the history of Kalashnakov and his namesake invention, and one of it's main points was that the AK-47 has become the weapon of choice for mobsters and terrorists because it's coarse and kinda abuse-proof. An M-16 has much more accuracy, but requires the kind of disciplined care that can only be assured with a more organized, structured force. An AK can go through swamps, can get filled with desert sand, and can almost never be cleaned and still operates with relatively the same efficacy. So I had built up some expectations, maybe even some hopes, for the M-16 I was to have glued to my person for the next five days. So far I'm kinda unimpressed that technology hasn't brought us something more elegant and ergonomic. We'll see if something more satisfying comes out of actually firing it once they finally give us blanks.

After boxed lunch and MRE issue, there was the business of digging "hygiene ditches" in which we are to spit our toothpaste and shave. When you assign an entire platoon to dig a ditch, and when your platoon has no greater entertainment than to whack the bottom of that ditch with a pick-axe and catcall at each other while waiting for the pick-axe, you get a mighty impressive place to spit toothpaste.

A rumor came down from leadership that, in searching for a suffienciently imposing name for the shadowy general heading our enemy forces, the cadre accidentally named him Gargomel, who also happens to have a side-job playing on the opposition force for the Smurfs. There is no word on whether the requested name change has been approved.

We awoke from our quick break to find Eddie crouched in front of our tent, maintaining security while the rest of us got up for further M-16 training. "Chuck Norris doesn't sleep, he waits." "Eddie is our Chuck Norris." In true Chuck Norris style, he went on eBay a few weeks ago and bought us a dozen Cingar radios, which proved invaluable strategically for the afternoon's movement rehearsals. They also helped us discover that Lieutenant Loren Walwyn-Tross has a wonderfully rich radio voice. It's a pitty that as Platoon Seargent he has more responsibilities than any of us, because it would be much easier to make him our permanant Radio Transmission Operator.

After rehearsals, we retired for a dinner of MREs. The vegetarian ones are not really all that horrible. The problem is, since I've become a grown-up, I've been remarkably good at being a selective enough eater that my usual standards are much higher than "not really all that horrible." But I absolutely admit that there are worse things one could eat than dry crackers and peanut-butter. Things like dry crackers and jalapeno-cheese spread. Or barbeque gardenburger on hardtac.
Tomorrow the mission begins.

Down at FRAGO Rock

2009-07-13T11:55:00.000-07:00

In September of 2006, I was driving north on I-35 from Ames, IA to Minneapolis, when I heard the breaking news on the radio that there had been a coup de etat in Thailand, that while the prime minister was abroad, the military had taken over the government. This would have been merely of passing interest to me if my parents were not in Bangkok that week for my dad to give briefings at our Army infectious disease laboratory in AFRIMS. The briefing, and all government business, were canceled for the day, and workers were instructed to go shopping.

Last month, there was a coup de etat in Honduras in which the president was forced from his home in his pajamas at gunpoint and flown to Costa Rica. Now, I'm not a geography expert, but if I were in Honduras and were given a free upgrade to Costa Rica, I wouldn't complain or ask too many questions, but apparently the president did not see it this way. The matter is still somewhat unsettled. I lived in northern Honduras immediately following undergrad, and I still haven't heard from my friends down there, friends who used to warn us not to leave our house on election day.

We hear about instability and catastrophes in the world every day--election irregularities in Iran, a cyclone in Burma, a tsunami in Indonesia, a shooting rampage in Mumbai--and it's easy to get desensitized, to assume these things are far away and don't affect me. And then something happens to show us that we are not so far away and disconnected after all.

Med school can be pretty all-consuming, especially around finals time, so I hadn't been following the news about Fort Indiantown Gap-Jazeeristan, Pennsylvania all that closely. I had had some vague sense that, just by virtue of the fact that they use words like "democratic" and "people's" and "republic" in their official name, the government was probably on the sketchy side. Apparently this spring they held elections, the opposition party (PFJ - People's Federation of Jazeeristan, I think) won by a landslide, and the ruling party (DJPF) refused to relinquish power. So the US officially recognizes only the PFJ, this according to the CIA fact sheet about the country. Then, a few weeks ago, a cyclone hit FIG-Jazeeristan, wreaking havoc on an already impoverished population. The international community has tried to supply aid, but the government will only accept food and supplies, no personnel, and has even assassinated humanitarian aid workers. So far, only 10% of the population has received even basic food, shelter, and medical assistance. So the UN has sent a peacekeeping force in and called upon the US to assist. And as Fort Indiantown Gap Jazeeristan is located uncomfortably close to our current theater of operations, and even more uncomfortably close to a strategic Reese's peanutbutter cup production facility in Hershey, PA, it is in our national interest to intervene.

So we're shipping out tomorrow. We were supposed to spend the day joyriding in helicopters, but instead our operational orders came in. First we were reminded of how dangerous a world FIG-JZ can be. Major Burns showed us some videos graphic enough that there was a disclaimer beforehand that anyone at risk for PTSD should leave the room. They were just as unpleasant as advertised. But they weren't gratuitous like the death-metal bombs-dropping video montage propaganda pieces we sometimes have to watch. They just showed very explicitly that there are people in this world who are not above targeting civilians and hospitals, even occasionally the very doctors who have saved their lives.

Then Lt Col Schwartz took us through an exercise in how to make an assignment unnecessarily complicated. The problem is, once your assignment changes from "connect nine paper plates with four straight lines" to "provide security and stability to UN aid workers so they can deliver emergency shelters, food, water, and medical care to a homeless, starving, desperate civilian population by fending off attacks from outside terrorist groups and militias of an illegitimate government in inconsistent uniforms that have no qualms about hiding in dense urban centers or killing suspected civilian US sympathizers," well, then some of the complicated parts don't seem so extraneous. Then it becomes relevant to know that we'll be operating in dense, subtropical forest with suspected H1N1 bird flu and lyme disease, and that the illegitimate government is currently spreading all kinds of anti-US/UN propaganda on the state-owned television station while depicting their generals ceremoniously handing out confiscated supplies. So we have to be uber-careful not to alienate the civilians, who have been given reasons to suspect our motives in descending upon their country.

What this comes down to is that the word of the week will be "FRAGO," short for "fragmentation order" or "whoops, sorry, change in plans." The first one will probably come when our command informs us which of the two local factions listed on our original orders as alternately both the good guys and bad guys actually contains the bad guys and which one actually contains allies, not that individual Jazeeris with small arms can't change their mind at any time to gain access to black-market gasoline or to ingratiate their way out of a sticky situation with x or y local thugs. In the words of Lieutenant Anthon Lemon, "So our mission is to protect and kill everybody." When we asked Steve Colonna for clarification, the working assumption is "if they're not us, they're bad." He'll let us know when there's better intel than that.

Somehow, it seems like a less than brilliant idea for us to be entering a FIG-JZ, PA without having a clear idea who our real enemies and allies actually are or who's even a civilian. But there are civilians dying of dysentery and starvation without fresh water and food as we speak, and it would be too risky to let the country fall into total anarchy so close to the strategic peanut butter cup production facility, so we make our last stops for antihistamines and breath strips at CVS tonight and head off in the morning. Stay tuned.

Oh, yes, and if we have moderate success carrying a tune, the Alphaholics theme song will be the first chorus of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab." If that proves too artistically complicated, we'll try to master a chorus of "Margaritaville." While we're working up to those, the provisional theme song is a compassionately short 1-verse variation on "99 Bottles of Beer." In our platoon chants this morning, there was a tribute to the classic USUHS School of Nursing accessory, the rollie bag, one tribute to the effect of MREs on the GI tract, an anti-chant, and one unprintable that will just have to be left to the imagination. If someone can make it out to the craft store tonight, the cadre will also have a guidon, sporting the motto "Our faculty has more confirmed kills than your faculty."

Last-minute Packing

2009-07-11T06:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Additional Train-up Week Photos

2009-07-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

The school's official photo squad also took some lovely action shots the morning we were doing tactical movement (the morning I wasn't playing paparazzi), which can be found here, along with other platoons rotating through the other lanes.

Speaking of tactical movement day, I felt impressed to comment during train-up week on the word "freakin'" or "frickin'," but never quite found a place to squish it into the narrative. There are times and places in the military when colorful language is not just permitted, but where it is the norm. Over spring break this March, my best friend from college and I ran into Catherine Imes and one of her college friends outside the Palazzo in Florence. We chatted for about a half-hour and then parted ways. Afterward Jord asked me if Catherine and I were actually friends or just happened to know each other from class. The question surprised me, as I am quite fond of Catherine, so I asked what he meant. I finally got it out of him that he didn't think we would have that much in common since she, um, had a mouth like a sailor. "Well, um, she is a sailor." I had grown so accustomed to her non-Grandma-friendly colloquialisms that I hardly even noticed it anymore. She's certainly not an anomaly.

Here (USUHS, med corps, maybe all of the more "professional" sectors--I don't know) and now (2009), we operate under a kinder, gentler, more PR-friendly military. Or maybe just more PR-friendly. Or at least someone told someone that. To be honest, I don't really know how far-reaching and official the language clean-up has spread. What I do observe is that I am told that when I hear "freakin'" gunfire, I am to hit the "freakin'" ground and "freakin'" return fire. I never did a count, but I would estimate that had nothing been freaking anything else, certain of our debriefs would have been twenty to thirty percent shorter. The frequency with which the comically un-salty euphemism sprinkles the discourse of certain of our classmates and trainers speaks of both an incredible and admirable amount of discipline and conscious effort focused on breaking a habit and a previous habit of speech so peppered with expletives and emphasis as to have been nonsensical.

It's not that I don't appreciate the effort. And the sentiment. It's like a moist towlette for the mind. Somewhere between YouTube and embedded reporters and winning hearts and minds, we became more aware of who was watching and how we affected them. But, like a moist towlette, it is neither invisible nor automatic. It is a conspicuous reminder of the schmutz that was there before and the institutional decisions to counter it, an artifact of who we were that points to who we are becoming.

And Thus Be It Ever When Free Men Shall Stand

2009-06-28T12:48:00.000-07:00

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.

Esprit de Corps

2009-06-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

The Alphaholics started the morning on the soccer field with a round of overhead claps and a birthday serenade to Catherine Imes and Aubrey Waters. For those of you taking notes, feel free not to celebrate my birthday with any sort of calisthenics. Chocolate cake will do.

There are sectors of my life where I fancy myself to be rather impressive, and random bystanders have occasionally confirmed that assessment. The problem is that I generally am not amongst random bystanders in these sectors, but rather people who live and breathe those sectors. I will give an example. My best friend from college ballroom and her dance partner were grabbing lunch at a cafe across the street from their studio a few years ago when their waiter recognized her partner and asked excitedly, "hey, didn't you dance in that Latin demo last week?" He said he had, and waited for the follow-up compliment on how incredible their dancing had been. "Man, you look great in spandex!" (My friend, who looks pretty hot in spandex herself, sat there next to him thinking, "and what am I, sliced meat?") The three of us were discussing afterward how, coming from someone with no ballroom expertise, that was probably a more meaningful complement than just telling them they danced well. They could be twice as impressive as they are or half as impressive as they are on the dance floor and would probably still get pretty much the same reaction and comments from people on the street.

I'm going somewhere with this, I promise. See, I'm wary of trash talk. If I am clearly better than someone at something, how weak and insecure does it make me look that I feel the need to point it out and rub it in? I probably can't even take credit for much of the difference anyway--I got started earlier than they did or was given a more suitable genetic endowment or better opportunities. Or I'm just more into it. And if there's even a chance that I'm not clearly better than them, how much of a fool suitable for the pity of Mr. T do I become if I've talked myself up only to be beaten? Much better to let my performance speak for itself.

Not everyone in our class has the same philosophy, however. Someone from one of the other platoons challenged us all to a last-man/woman-standing push-up contest. To me, this seems rash. Given the number of incredibly fit members of our class, it would take a lot of chutzpah to presume you could outdo all of the rest of them, even if you are one of them. But down we went on Major Burns's count, then up again, then down. Now, the number of push-ups I can do is impressive to most of my civilian friends, but I don't talk them up because it doesn't mean much to be able to do more push-ups than someone who isn't tested on them to stay in his career, and the number is nothing special by military standards (even Air Force). So down and up I went until I was clearly breaking form, and then I stood up to cheer. As the numbers climbed higher, more and more people dropped out until the only four I could see left down were Amy Alexander and Edward Dolomisiewicz from our platoon and Connie Barko and Sean McIntire from the two platoons beside us. As they topped 130, their jugular venous distension got so prominent you could have just hooked your finger around the whole vessel. By then everyone's form had gone to pot, but Major Burns kept ordering them down and up, so they just kept going. Amy dropped out before Major Burns okayed resting in the "up" position and the rumor from the crowd surrounding Sean was that he had already taken a knee and was now back up just to push the others. To be honest, I think if Connie hadn't kept going past 150, Eddie wouldn't have kept going, but with all of us there cheering our lungs out he just pushed on until Connie dropped at around 172. She seemed pretty bothered that someone had beaten her. For his part, I think Eddie would have been fine had there been ten more people still up who just kept going beyond his breaking point (when your standard is the Rangers, it only means so much to beat a bunch of medical students), but when it was clear that it was down to just the two of them, he tapped into some hidden reserve and kept going by sheer force of will.

I decided yesterday that that's what I like most about our platoon. Not that we win a lot, though that certainly doesn't hurt, but that nobody is trying to lead by the ego. Eddie can beat the whole class in a push-up contest, but he's not so presumptuous to challenge the whole class to a push-up contest. Effective and expedient orders in the field often don't have room for friendly courtesies, but in the Alphaholics, nobody's pride is hurt when they're yelled at to move up or get down or take cover behind a bigger tree. Nobody's jockeying for position or trying to override the leaders of any given exercise or taking offense when her idea is passed up. When something goes wrong, we make corrections and adjustments on the spot, but then in the after-action reports we say "we made a bad judgment call in such-and-such and need to get x better next time" rather than "he made a bad call in such-and-such." Nobody makes comments just to hear his own voice.

We didn't win any of the individual skills awards this time around, it would have been pretty hard for any of the other platoons to top our esprit de corps. The only other platoon that had a motto was Lieutenant David Garcia's platoon's "Death Before Discomfort!" Which, I have to admit, is catchy. And if I were teamed with a bunch of people who didn't much care, I probably wouldn't mind so much partaking of their casual apathy, and I think most of our platoon members are probably the same way. But since the first week's military studies lab when we discovered a brilliant synergy that turned a physics experiment (creating an egg-protecting structure) into a risque yet ironic infomercial with pop-culture references and very un-PC stabs at public figures that still managed to be artful--since that very first moment when we tasted the possibility of victory, we have been driven. Our guidon is a work of art--a bottle breaking through bars with our motto "You can't C.A.G.E. this!" on a background of cammo-pattern flannel, execution courtesy of Catherine Imes and Nicole Baker but conceptually the product of group brainstorming, guarded diligently by Anthon Lemon. Plus the motto itself, with it's nerdy patient-interview reference twisted into an irreverent and sassy chant--how could we not have fun yelling that? We may not have individual superstars in the hot, buttered macho-on-a-stick sense or even the top level of collective proficiency, but we've got ganas and we've got style, and I'll take those any day.

The training itself for today was on preventative medicine (PrevMed). Ensign Rebecca Hardy from one of the other alpha squads briefed us on all the things we'll need to buy--oh, excuse me, do--before we go out: camelbacks, gobs and gobs of sunscreen, tons of socks, GORP, ear protection, bug spray, antihistamines, different wipes for different assorted body parts, and anything else that might possibly come in handy while being attacked in the woods of Fort Indiantown Gap Kazerkisan, Pennsylvannia. Somehow my conception of this whole exercise had been that we would spend the entire time in tents (except when they would send us out on missions in the middle of the night) and under constant attack by opposing forces and would only be able to bring what we could lug to the tents in one duffle bag, but I'm not complaining that there seems to be time built in for a religious service on Sunday and decompression while we're waiting to help Bushmaster. There are books I got for Christmas that have been taunting me from my desk for months as I parceled out my precious discretionary time to exercise and friends and sleep and found very little left to keep my droopy eyes open on another page. I still can't get over the fact that I'm actually on break.

But, once again, ahead of myself. PrevMed. Some people find this boring. I probably would have, too, had I not spent a year and a half in Central America after undergrad, where we didn't take things like potable water coming out of the tap (or sometimes any water coming out of the tap) for granted. To me, this is part of what makes America great. The Taliban or North Korea or even someone like China, if you get injured in combat to defend its ideals, is not going to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into your medical care and rehabilitation, will not provide a lifetime of V.A. disability compensation. To America, military manpower is not expendable. We have invested too much in your training and your family and your future to send you on a suicide mission. And because we have so much vested interest in our troops and their effectiveness, it matters to us to what toxic materials we expose them and in what quantities, and whether or not they have hearing when we are finished with them. We are the most powerful military in the world because we are well armed, yes, but also because we have environmental engineers that make sure we are not incapacitated with dysentary and entymologysts and permethrin to keep malaria at bay and work-rest cycles to prevent heat casualties. Would Robert Mugabi do this for those defending his ideals? I don't think so.

After lunch we did an AAR (after-action report) on the week's training with Major Burns. In my own cheesy way, I believe AARs are also part of what makes America great. I mean, what kind of culture, what kind of an institution and system goes back after the fact to ask trainees how to train them better? It shows a respect for our intelligence, a humility, a desire for excellence, a capacity for introspection, an attitude that celebrates progress and doesn't condemn the admission of mistakes, an expectation of accountability for all participants. It also gives us all a chance to get a peek into what the other participants' perspective was and to reflect on the original mission and goals.

And now we're off for two weeks. I'll probably add a few things here and there in the next week that I missed, and then will have to figure out the logistics of blogging from up in Fort Indiantown Gap Kazerkisan, Pennsylvannia. But, no worries. I'll scribble a few notes on the back of leaves of not-three and stuff them in my pockets with my MREs as I'm running from enemy fire so I don't forget anything important.

Did You Ever Know That You're My Helo?

2009-06-25T13:52:00.000-07:00

This morning's training on extraction began as many mornings do, with Powerpoint. Major Burns explained to us that there are four types of people in this world. The sheep just cower and wait for someone else to act upon them. The wolves prey on the sheep. The sheepdogs stand against the wall and say "everything's going to be alright." The wolfhounds track down the wolves and destroy them so they are no longer a threat. He neglected to mention a fifth type of person--the computer techs. Without them, neither the wolfhounds nor the sheepdogs can get their Powerpoints to work.

During the interlude while we waited for tech support, Lieutenant Brian Pomerantz from one of the other alpha platoons demonstrated how to remove an injured victim from a crashed car without aggravating any potential spinal injuries. Apparently, the the best way to keep them on a backboard is duct tape. Why is everything cooler when it involves duct tape? I sometimes get so caught up in how awesome our platoon is that I forget that our entire class is filled with people who are pretty darn spiffy. We've been operating in closer quarters with them today as we rotate through various missions, and I've been impressed with how often it occurs to me "oh, wow, it'd be great to have him/her on my team, too." I guess what makes our platoon exceptional to me is that it's filled with people who are under-the-radar awesome. Take Ensign Seamus Cobb, the delta team leader. Who would have bet the quiet, skinny redhead kid would have taken first of all the men in the class Marine PT test competition, beating out all the ostentatiously macho men in our class? (Though not, it must be noted, beating Amy Alexander.) During our third extraction exercise this morning, Seamus was promoted to platoon sergeant, and, as medic, I was assigned to stick with him like glue until there were casualties to treat. I could barely keep track of all the decisions he was making, seamlessly coordinating intel and orders from up front and reconnaissance from the flanks and behind to direct the movements of two rear squads, all of them operating with new leadership. He kept his cool when we were engaged from close range, adapted to changes in operation orders without flinching, and knew not only where all his chess pieces were at all times, but where they would need to be three moves ahead and how to get them there safely. Expect great things from that man.

But I am ahead of myself. Our first exercise involved extracting an IED victim from a Humvee that looked suspiciously like Major Burns's wife's Yukon. Minutes before the operation started, however, all three squad leaders and our platoon leadership had simultaneous cardiac arrests (have they no age caps on med students anymore?) and were taken out of the picture. Nicole moved from my Charlie team leader to second squad leader, and, by a careful and thorough rock-paper-scissors deliberation, I was chosen to take over Charlie team. It is so much more complicated to play the chess game than to be a chess piece. It's not enough for me to hear "bang-bang" and drop, point towards it, and yell it back. But when you're a leader, you have to think about where everybody else is supposed to drop and whom to leave covering security when the fire is suppressed and how to fill in gaps as each segment advances. You have to decide whether being able to see the opposing force is sufficient reason to hold everybody ready to attack or whether the fact that they're not actively firing means you can spare a few to fulfil other aspects of the mission. We managed to hold a solid perimeter, though, long enough that Catherine Imes the Supermedic could stabilize the victim and Anthon Lemon and Kevin Gray could carry him, first to the casualty collection point (CCP), then all the way up to the helo landing zone (LZ). I know these men in real life, and still I am amazed at the speed they carried that litter up that hill. Even simulated desperation seems to work for an adrenaline boost.

Our second mission was a hostage rescue. Our trek through the woods went wonderfully, easily suppressing the minimal hostile fire, until the opposing force saw us coming and detonated the bridge across the ravine. (Jaime Piercy, our real-world walking-wounded casualty, took on photo duties and trekked back and forth across the woods and even took some great aerial shots from the top of the out-of-play bridge.) So we--that's right--crossed the water. You can't really get away with "let's just not and say we did" when the building with your hostages is on the other side. For the sake of all the real-world cars in the parking lot surrounding our target building, we went on non-tactical mode to cross the parking lot, then set up road guards and attempted to secure a perimeter around Building 59.

And then things began to go wrong. Edward Dolomisiewicz directed me to guard a four-foot gap between a corner of Building 59 and one of the brain research labs while the first squad entered the building and secured the combatants and hostages, but I was on the medic's support team that needed to follow them up to help bring down wounded. My squad leader, Dan Bailey, who had managed to guide us all across the ravine faster than I ever thought I could run up and down such a steep gradient, placed Ensign Sameer Saxeena at the guard post on the corner. Sameer inched forward just a few inches too far, and one of the insurgents grabbed the musket of his rifle, came around the corner, and shot Sameer and our entire medic support team before any of us knew what was happening. I have to hand it to Bailey, everything we accomplished as a platoon outside the building from that moment on was a result of his quick reshuffling. With Jen Nuetzi, our original medic, now out of commission, Catherine Imes took the supply bag and an extraction team up into the building to bring down casualties while Bailey tightened our thinner perimeter security as more guards were taken off line to watch EPWs (enemy prisoners of war) and care for the wounded at the CCP. I didn't mind being dead so much, slumped along the side of the building and being carried into the shade, until a bug flew into my nose. When you're dead, you can rehydrate and reapply sunscreen and shout warnings at the guards not to place EPWs so close to piles of rifles. When the building was finally cleared (the two hostages we had been sent to rescue were nowhere to be found, rendering the whole mission gratuitous), the medivac came and magically healed and/or resurrected the rest of us casualties so we could escort the prisoners back across the ravine and woods to our original HQ. We took some fire from the sides and had a moment of chaos before the platoon leadership realized that they couldn't send EPW teams to pull peripheral security, but made it back with no new casualties.

Our third mission involved rescuing downed pilots--you guessed it--on the other side of the ravine. By this time Seamus was already wet to almost his waistline from plowing through the water on the last mission, and most of the rest of us had at least boots wet with sewage run-off stream water. But this time I was medic, so got to watch most of the chess game from the inside. Dan Raboin was platoon leader, and I have to say I was blown away by how effective and thorough communication was this time around. Unfortunately, somehow we misunderstood the original scenario and did not realize there was a second pilot to rescue until the litter team came back with the first one. They were tired and fairly deserved to switch out, but they were also already familiar with the terrain where the plane had gone down, so they had to do a second set of stream crossings and were not relieved until I had treated the burns and hemorrhages of the two mannequins. Watching my friends struggle to carry these mannequins made me much less sympathetic to the people who want weight limits in the military to be relaxed.

In the afternoon, we went over communications codes, both within ground forces and between the ground and a helicopter. Then we went back out into the fields to practice 9-lines, hand signals with noise discipline, and helo directions. (In between, one of the NNMC departments having a picnic in the pavilion invited us to eat their spare cookies, burgers, and chicken. It doesn't count as raiding and pillaging if you're invited, does it?) If you're ever looking for group participation, just call out "who wants to be the helicopter?" I can't think of a single time before this when all of us volunteered at once. Who doesn't want to be the helo? Then you can sing along with Enrique Iglesias, "I can be your helo, baby. I can kiss away your pain (oh, yeah). I will stand by you forever...." Anyway, today Dan Bailey was my helo.

If They Decontaminated Me So Thoroughly, Why Do I Still Feel So Dirty?

2009-06-24T15:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Introductions

2009-06-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

Like any good story, Living Outside the CAGE will introduce its audience to pertinent characters as we go along, and leave the judgment of them to you. But I thought early on I should throw in a few highlights.

In our platoon, we all bring various talents to the table. Steve Colonna, for instance, brings a level-headedness and a knack for simplicity that makes him a comfort and a pleasure to follow. I know he won't ask us to do anything unless it's important. Catherine Imes brings style. Amy Alexander brings a gung-ho enthusiasm for all things challenging and the skills and persistance to back it up. Eddie Dolomisiewicz brings mature, pragmatic real-world expertise, and, more importantly, a patience for those of us who don't have it yet. And he brings duct tape that's so awesome that they don't even call it duct tape, they call it hundred mile an hour tape. Dan Bailey brings a Texas penchant for action. Lucas Groves has a pleasant-naturedness that always makes people more comfortable when they're around him. I feel very confident in the quietly capable hands of Dan Raboin and Andrew Fisher. And me? I bring snarky commentary and the chutzpah to share it with the world. More on team members later.

A Rather Successful Day, Except for the Getting Killed at the End Part

2009-06-23T14:38:00.000-07:00

The Alphaholics began Day 2 at the luxuriously late hour of 7:30 a.m. in Lecture Room E, learning how to plot a dead reckoning course on a map, not to fall into ditches, and that azimuth is not a classic science fiction writer. In preparation for our every-day navigation across the landscape of Kirkeshner, Lieutenants Lucas Groves and Daniel Bailey taught us how to translate the lines and squiggles of a contour map into elevation gradients and geographical landmarks. After a few practice runs and measuring our paces on both flat and , we plotted our own courses connecting various checkpoints in the USUHS woods and set off with nothing but an aerial photo of the grounds north of campus, a blank grid with our calculated course, and clunky, Vietnam-era compasses. Lieutenant Keehn also brought along his wrist-mounted GPS, though it didn't get much signal in the woods. In teams of two, we got first-hand experience in figuring out how to translate trajectories through bushes and across ravines into something a little more navigable (though a few of us did play balance-beam across the logs).

After lunch Ensign Jaime Piercy taught us about the legal treatment of Enemy Prisoners of War and what to do if we are caught in such a situation. (Hint: resist. Then resist some more. Then try to escape. Don't give up, don't give useful information, escape, escape, escape. But if you're a doctor, treat all patients, including the enemies'. Then escape.) Ensign Seamus Cobb went over how we search and subdue captives. It involves more gratuitous pat-downs. Between practicing searching for bleeding, checking one another's harnesses, and searching for weapons and contraband, we've gotten a lot of practice groping one another this week. At least they're teaching us how to do it respectfully. (Hint: you don't need to, um, dwell anywhere. A quick sweep should tell you everything you need to know.)

Now I'm not a big woman, and I've always assumed that my self-defense strategies should involve things like not harassing people with known impulse-control problems or surrounding myself with people who have ulterior motives to keep me intact, but I appreciated the very useful, practical instruction on immobilizing the limbs and head and maintaining a search-ee off-balance. Then we went outside and got to practice. Wooo-eee was that fun. We worked on various two-on-one and three-on-one take-downs. I had been resenting our k-pot helmets for two days now, but I have to admit that mine probably saved me from a concussion when I decided to see just how much resistance I could put up against Lieutenant Anthon Lemon and his wrestling expertise. And wow--what a rush. I think I got the grass equivalent of rug burns on my face and am definitely developing bruises across my arms and legs, but I managed to hold them off for what seemed like a respectably long time. I wonder how his wife Val would take it if we just got together to wrestle in the living room every once in a while. For practice. We could, you know, move the coffee table first. Across the softball field, people seemed to be having similar jolly good times twisting and writhing on the ground in groups. The only thing missing would have been Jello.

To top off the afternoon, we learned how to clear buildings and rooms with "rubber duckies" (mock M-16s). At first we were very successful in rounding corners and shouting "bang" before the opposing force hiding behind those corners shouted "bang," but by our third attempt to clear all insurgents from Building 59, our platoon sustained massive (that is to say, complete, universal, total) casualties because of one sneaky booger who kept hiding in the bathroom stall and sniping people coming around the corner one by one. I will never enter a bathroom the same way again. Unfortunately, despite the incredibly Hollywood-esque setting in a building built around two-story dive tank with observation windows, we were never able to shoot them in such a way that they staggered backward over the railing and splashed into the water. Oh, well. For a day in which the entire platoon died, we can only expect so much.

Pre-Game Kick-off

2009-06-22T15:13:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning and looked at my alarm clock. 6:01. I was supposed to be on the soccer field, in formation at 6 a.m. or my squad will have to do push-ups. How in the world did that happen? I set the alarm for 4 so I could hit snooze a few times, have a nice leisurely high-protein breakfast, re-check my gear and be in place at a quarter till. It's a good thing I live a block away. And that I produce very minimal body odor. Even with the base police stopping to give me a warning for speeding, I was still dressed and in formation by 6:22 (so no required push-ups), and it turned out we weren't really required to be there until 6:30, and didn't start doing any real training until 7:30. But, wow, sheer terror totally beats the heck out of caffeine for waking you up. Holy cow.

We started the day by sitting. And not quite having everything. But in short order we were issued our own rubber ducky "rifles" (not, as Lieutennant Dolomisiewicz corrected us, "guns") and were placed in the capable hands of Lieutennants Anthon Lemon and Marion Keehn, covering the basics of Tactical Combat Casualty Care. Our winter term Combat Medical Skills coursework came in handy as we set about triaging and evacuating one another from varous corners of the USUHS woods. When an insurgent group running the Land Navigation lanes stole half of our weapons, we successfully completed our mission with the remaining rifles and an assortment of appropriately-sized sticks. I have to admit, I was never one of those kids who would point sticks at people and yell "bang," so I was probably much less adept at this part of the mission than some of my counterparts. Nevertheless, I found it to be a rather satisfying experience and highly recommend it to anyone crouching behind a tree and guarding a perimeter of a critical woods-crossing mission in suburban Bethesda. We unfortunately sustained a handful of casualties, all of whom were successfuly triaged and prepared for evacuation by our expert quarter-doctors.

In the afternoon, Ensign Amy Alexander proceeded once again to blow away expectations by creating a Swiss Seat to tight that Master Seargent Wilson tore skin off his finger trying to check it. With the help of Lieutennant Ian McDougall, we practiced our technique on a fifteen-degree slope. Then one by one, we took the elevator to the third floor of Building A, the stairs to the fourth, and a ladder to the roof and proceeded to lower ourselves down the side of the wall. How exactly this makes us better doctors I haven't quite wrapped my mind around yet, but that doesn't mean I think we should stop doing it. Photos below are some of the highlights, though more are posted on our official Facebook group page http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=224911420640&ref=mf.