And the Carnage Continues

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.

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

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.

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

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.