My Frugal Wife

Last week I got a message from an Associated Press reporter writing about frugal lifestyles. My wife Annalisa is in the lead of the article.

No Pass to San Antonio During Basic Training

While I was in San Antonio, I saw dozens of Air Force basic trainees walking around in their new, rather ill-fitting uniforms, some with family, some in groups taking pictures of each other at the Alamo and tourist traps. Seeing them reminded me I never got the one-day pass to San Antonio while I was in Basic training in 1972. Our flight (the Air Force equivalent of a platoon) got 7 days of KP--kitchen clean-up duty--during our six weeks of basic training. Most flights got one or two. The other three flights training with us got none. The reason was Ivan--a tiny little guy in our flight who refused to throw away his electric razor and shave with a blade like the rest of us. Why did this matter? When the inspectors from headquarters went through our barracks, ten demerits among 45 guys meant we were on KP. Ivan got 15 by himself because they counted hairs inside his electric razor. We got 2 days of KP for that in addition to the one we had just for being in the duty rotation. Two weeks later, Ivan flunked again and we got four days of KP--including the weekend we were scheduled for a day in San Antonio. Our drill sergeant let us know that if any harm came to Ivan we would all be serving our enlistments in Leavenworth Federal Prison. We did get Ivan back, but that's for a later post.

Randy's Parents Will Go Home Soon

Continuing from the last post, Randy's Mom and Dad, Debbie and Neil, will be returning home to West Virginia soon. Debbie said Randy is healing so well that he will be able to live on his own soon as he goes through Rehab for the next year or so. Debbie said she would like to stay with her son, but she will also be happy to be home. Debbie works for Coldwater Creek and said they have been "really great through all of this." They said they will hold her job as long as it takes. I will keep in touch with Debbie and Neil and post something when I hear news.

Center for the Intrepid

Today I saw the Center for the Intrepid, what is now the main rehab center for badly injured soldiers. Sandy, the receptionist, let me see the first floor public areas and told me about the facility. I had to sign up in advance for a tour so that will have to wait for another time. I talked to soldiers yesterday and today with Boston accents. I grew up in Boston and lost the accent in Basic training in 1972, but can still hear it in just 2 or 3 words. Both soldiers were from suburbs outside Boston. One was looking forward to going back home to stay, the other wanted to stay in San Antonio. I knew they were both real natives because they both talked about how expensive everything is in Massachusetts compared to the South. Real Boston-area natives far from home love to complain about prices back home and talk about how cheap things are everywhere else. Any mention of the Red Sox comes after the price complaints.

Randy's Parents

Today I visited the Powless guest housing located just across the road from the Center for the Intrepid. I met the parents of a soldier named Randy. He was in the family's room sleeping. Mom and Dad were outside in the smoker's gazebo. Randy stepped on an IED on January 13 of this year. His immediate prospects were grim. His left hand was gone and the rest of the arm was mangled and his legs were both mangled to the point that they were not sure the legs could be saved. Randy's Mom described the doctors from both Landstuhl where Randy was first Med-evaced and Brooke as "amazing." Randy is the sixth of seventh children of a blended family from West Virginia and the only soldier.
More later, they just closed the door on my flight so I have to sign off.

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.