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."
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