Real-world Chafing

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.

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

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.