Take-off

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

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."

Additional Train-up Week Photos

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.

Did You Ever Know That You're My Helo?

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?

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.

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.

Pre-Game Kick-off

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.