Last-minute Packing

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.

Esprit de Corps

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.