Fisher House at Brooke Army Medical Center

This weekend I am in San Antonio on business at a petrochemical conference that starts Sunday afternoon at 430pm. I arrived at 2am on a late flight from Newark and rented a bike at 11 this morning. I rode a north and east then back to the south to Brooke Army Medical Center. I had read several articles about the Center for the Intrepid at Brooke, the places where amputees and other severely wounded soldiers go through rehab. I arrived Saturday at 1pm to the sound of loud music. Crossroads, a local Texas rock band, was playing on the porch at Fisher House and a local group was serving barbeque to soldiers and their families. I talked to a volunteer named Pete Peterson who told me about the place then introduced me Inge Godfrey and Russell Fritz, the manager and assistant manager respectively. Russ gave me a tour. It turns out Inge and I lived in the same military housing area in 1976-77--her husband and I were assigned to the same base in Germany. I am going back tomorrow morning.

Back to Work

I have been catching up on work for the past few days and thinking about the contrast between the Army and my civilian job. At work I am a manager without a staff. A manager because I have a budget, but a "private soldier" when it comes to work. I write news releases, speeches, negotiate with video producers and photographers, talk to reporters who cover chemistry, and work on teams that are getting ready for events. The emphasis is on what I do. I work at home two days a week because I live 70 miles away and many of the things I do, I do alone. And if something comes up in a project I am working on that our president or a director should know about, I can drop in and talk to them, or send them an e-mail.
In the school at Aberdeen, my first responsibility was to be wherever the school staff said I was supposed to be. Even the tests and performance evaluations were essentially pass-fail. As soon as I met the standard on a performance test or got 70% on a written exam I was done with that art of the course and on to the next part. One member of our class was clearly the best at every hands-on performance measure in the course. If someone was stuck, he was the one they called. But he got a low (passing) grade on one test and so we did not have an honor grad. the first sergeant spoke to us every morning at formation before we went to class. In fact we could depend on him repeating everything at least once per formation then repeating a lot of the same warnings and information a half-dozen times more.
In my day job, time matters. Standing in front of our first sergeant all that mattered was that he believed that we understood the information he was passing to us.
Today I worked on 20 different things, and did no paperwork to prove I did any of it. I am a civilian again--at least until May.

Graduation

We got our DA form 1059s, the form saying we are now qualified in our military job (MOS or Military Occupational Specialty). There were four different groups and ours was last. We were all seated at tables and went up one at a time to receive our certificate from the course instructor then shake hands with the instructor, NCOIC (sergeant in charge) of the school and the school commander. At the end of the ceremony the NCOIC, an master sergeant with close to 30 years service who is younger than me, told the group he wanted to bring one of the students to their attention "Specialist Gussman who has a 23 year break in service and has the patriotism to return to duty after all these years." I got a round of applause and some very quizzical looks. In the hallway later a couple of guys from other classes said, "That's way cool what you did." I didn't really do anything, but it felt like I just won a race--and I didn't even sweat.

Last Class

This last class covered the 1500 gallon-per-minute water purification unit and finished up the smoke generator. We then took a test on the smoke generator and went to lunch. After lunch we presented plaques to our instructors. My roommate got them made at a local trophy shop for each of our instructors. Neither of the instructors had ever received a plaque from their students, so it is apparently an unusual gesture. Before presenting the plaques, the guy from Las Vegas whom our instructor had dropped for pushups on a half-dozen occasions took charge of the class and ordered all of us to the Front Leaning Rest (pushup) position. We then did ten pushups together yelling out "One sergeant, two sergeant. . ." as we did them. The instructor then said she would accept all of our pushups for the ones our class clown owed her. It was a great way to end the class. After we were dismissed, I rode my bike, went to the gym on Post and went running. The 20-somethings in the class got a case of Miller. All three of them can max the PT test without working out. Even the one of them who smokes can run two miles in under 13 minutes. Different ages have different workout schedules.

Last Supper

For those who follow the Church calendar, the Thursday before Easter is the night of the last supper. Without making too many Biblical references, our class had its last supper together on Maundy Thursday--at TGI Friday's. There were 11 of us, but that's pretty close. Anyway, we drove 20 miles west to get to TGI Friday's in the 15 passenger van that hauled us to meals for most of the two weeks. During our 30-minute wait for a table, I called my youngest daughter to ask her what was the best thing to order at TGIF (I have never been to TGI Fridays--that was part of how we picked this restaurant.) She told me about the top-chef menu they are featuring in their ads. she also asked why we didn't drive 15 miles further and go to Baltimore. Everyone had just one or two drinks. We all had to get up at 6am for the final class, so no one "got their party on." One of my classmates from Las Vegas talked about joining the Army in 2003. He was a sprinter and hurdler in high school running the 400 in just under a minute. His recruiter told him he could be on the army track team, just sign up for 11 Bravo (Combat Infantry). When he completed infantry training, he went to Iraq. He never joined the Army track team.

I Passed the Laundry Test This Time

Today we learned about the Laundry Advanced System LADS I mentioned in an earlier post. This amazing self-contained system on a semi-trailer can wash 2-tons of clothes operating 20 hours per day and use just 540 gallons of water for each ton of clothes.

Real Smoke

Today the active army class fired up an M56 smoke generator right outside the building where we work on our equipment. I was surprised because these billowing smoke clouds can only be generated for short periods under conditions of nearly no wind, but two classes sent big white clouds into the countryside. The building on the far side of the cloud all but disappeared after just seconds of smoke. It works very well at hiding a building and works much better obscuring smaller things-like vehicles.