Ah, bliss… I get to sleep in my own bed, again… don’t get disturbed by 58 other noisy, smelly Gis in my space… life is good, for a little while. Just sitting around listening to Pete Yorn’s MusicForTheMorningAfter, sipping my tea and checking my email.

My schedule for this Leave is now pretty full, so for those who want a chance to see me before I depart for overseas, it’d be best to contact me within the next two days. It’d be easier if the softball team still had games scheduled, but apparently that’s over. Was the Bats’ record this year any better than the previous year’s?

BIG NEWS!

I’ve finally got orders!!! I’m being posted at Camp Casey, Korea, with the 2nd Infantry Division. Assuming the Brigade I’m going to isn’t set to deploy to the mideast, I’ll be in Korea for about 13 months (maybe longer if it turns out I like it there and choose to extend… I don’t know… I’ve never been to Korea before.)

Aside from that, Friday was a really good day for me.

Validation lanes, trauma exercises, and I got THE toughest lane they’ve got in the evaluations. Scenario is a soldier with massive trauma to the lower face & head and a partial amputation of the left hand with an associated compound fracture. All that involves treatment of a dummy. You also get a LIVE volunteer to serve as the arm you have to place the catheter in when it’s time to initiate the IV. There’s a 30-minute time limit, within which you have to treat all injuries, initiate an IV, and package the dummy for helicopter transport.

Complications on the lane I was on? The lights are turned off in the building, there’s a strobelight going, there’s a lot of smoke in the air from a stage fog machine, there’s a soundtrack of gunfire & explosions blaring in the background, and the evaluator in my lane was just a little bit psychotic… this guy likes to stand behind the person being tested and scream obscenities at them to see if he can rattle their cool.

I had the soldier on the LZ in twenty minutes, and the volunteer actually thanked me for not mangling his arm during the IV. One shot, one kill.

Uh-huh, dat’s right, We Bad. If you can get an IV stick on the first try with all that chaos around you, you know you’re gonna’ do well in this job. (Just as an FYI, the idiot who forgot to bring his Aidbag? He was a no-go on his first attempt, and if he can’t pass on Monday, he’ll be recycled. We’re all hoping that’s what will happen.)

This will be my last update for a few weeks… I’ve got the Field Exercise which overlaps next weekend, and the following weekend I’ll be packing to come home on leave.

See you on August 28th!

Thursday… oh, Thursday was funny. You can’t make shit like this up.

We’ve got one particular IET soldier who’s… how shall I put this… a flippin’ idiot. Kid’s got a habit of allowing his mouth to hang open if he’s not paying attention to it… yup, literally he’s a slack-jawed fool.
Anyways, he’s had more-than-one incident of leaving his weapon unattended, so recently they’ve taken to attatching his rifle to him with a dummy-cord. This has helped with the rifle, but I think they may need to go a step further.

Thursday, we were running a simulation exercise, where we’re doing triage & treatment on dummies; the dummies are attatched to computer controllers and pumps, so they have pulses, their chests move like they’re breathing, and there’s stage-blood leaking out of their wounds. High-speed stuff; you’ve got a team of 5 medics, and there are 10-15 “casualties” to be treated.

So, on my run through lane #2, I get put into the group containing this idiot. All of us made certain to check the guy to see if he had his rifle, but none of us bothered to see if he’d remembered to bring his Aid-bag.
Yup, that’s right, we were 30 seconds into the exercise when he realized he didn’t have any first-aid supplies to work with, other than the single tourniquet in his right cargo pocket.
How in the blue blazes do you forget your Aid-bag?!?!

The instructor gave him a lot of grief, all of us in his team gave him a good razzing for it, and when the others in the platoon started giving him flak about it, he finally snapped and started screaming… and started to lunge for one soldier in particular… and then stumbled and nearly fell because his rifle got tangled in his gear, and it was still dummy-corded to his LBE.

I really hope they recycle this clown, or even better, reclass him to some other MOS where he’s less likely to get somebody killed.

BTW, I return to STL from 28 AUG - 10 SEP, including my birthday, 05 SEP. Hope to see many of you during that time.

Ciao!