Civilian Time

I opened an email this morning and went from placid to pissed off in a millisecond. The email asked me about starting a book group. It wasn't that he wanted to start one right away or at any definite time in the future, he just thought it would be a good idea. His life is swamped right now and he wants to wait until the timing is right.

I have known this guy for years. the timing will never be right. Or if he does get involved he will be less involved over time, because he is the sort of person who life happens to, he does not make life happen. But now when I hear something like this, a voice in my head says, "Make a f-ing decision."

It will be quite a while before I get adjusted to this kind of civilian time: the kind of time that is like Jello, no hard edges, collapses under pressure, and even when it stays in one place, it jiggles.

More than my reaction, I get worried about the different feeling I have about things like this. In the Army everyone is healthy, no one is old--or at least not older than me--and if someone is very sick or badly injured they are MEDEVACed away. It is an unreal world which suits me very well, but the Army is hardly my life and in three years they will toss me out. So I really will be working to adjust to the world I live in where people with money and resources take care of the poor and people who can make an f-ing decision help those who can't.

Otherwise I will be just another rebel who wants to the world that suits his own taste and wants to get rid of everyone he doesn't like. There are enough of those already.

Nice Butt!

Bike racers seen from a car window.

To a car driving toward a bicyclist from behind (yes, I meant to say that) all male bicycle racers look alike.  They are thin, folded like a paper clip and wearing spandex.  Today, for the first time in almost two years, a  car with several college-age girls drove by me and the blond in the passenger seat yelled "Nice Butt!" as she went by.

Since the road was flat--West River Drive in Philadelphia--and my head was down, it is possible that none of the young women in the car knew they were yelling at a member of AARP.  I have to say no one yelled anything like that as I rode around Tallil Air Base.

Video from Iraq

The first half of this video and a few of the shots at the end are pictures I took in Iraq.  My photos go from the beginning to where you see a video cameraman in a red shirt.

Entered in Tough Mudder Race on my 57th Birthday

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Photo from Rappel Tower Confidence Course, Fort Sill, OK, 2009

On May 2nd when I turn 57 I will be competing in the Tough Mudder race at Bear Creek Ski Resort in Pennsylvania. The organizers call it:

The Toughest one day event on the planet. This is not your average mud run or boring, spirit-crushing road race. Our 7 mile obstacle courses are designed by British Special Forces to test all around toughness, strength, stamina, fitness, camaraderie, and mental grit. Forget about your race time. Simply completing the event is a badge of honor. Not everyone will finish, but those who do make it to our post-race party will have truly earned the right to call themselves a Tough Mudder. All Tough Mudder sponsorship proceeds go to our exclusive charity partner, The Wounded Warrior Project. DogFish Head Brewery has generously agreed to provide FREE Post-Race Beer.

From the Web site it looks like an obstacle course on steroids. Check it out. I am planning on being very sore May 3.

Once a Warrior Always a Warrior

Last week I got a book in the mail that I thought was just for real warriors. After all, most of my service was inside the wire on a very big, well-protected air base and when I went outside the wire it was in a Blackhawk or Chinook helicopter, not in a convoy.

Then I started reading the book and it reminded me of something a medic told me near the end of my tour. He knew how I got in the Army by very carefully answering questions about the accident I had between my enlistment physical and actual enlistment. I thought it would have been the injuries that disqualified me from service, especially from deployment. But the medic said, "It was the concussion. You lost three days man. You got your bell rung like it was in a Church steeple. They would have sent your ass home if they knew."

The title of the book is "Once a Warrior Always a Warrior" by Charles W. Hoge, MD, Col. USA ret. The subtitle is: Navigating the Transition from Combat to Home Including Combat Stress, PTSD, and mTBI.

The last item, mTBI, is the one that affected me before deployment. Since we only had an occasional missile attack, mostly when we first arrived, Combat Stress and PTSD were not part of my life. But the chapter on mTBI made sense out of some stuff that bothers me still, almost three years after the accident. It was also interesting to me that he mentioned combatives training. I wrote about hanging on in my match when I got paired up with a 21-year-old body builder in a combatives match. Twice during that training I was "out" for a moment.

But since the accident I have not been able to retain my ability to read Greek or French as well as before. I gave up on Greek in Iraq and struggled with simple French. But memory is one of the problems with mTBI. It could be I am just getting old, but next month I get a physical from my civilian doctor and I will ask him about both the accident and the combatives and if I should be doing anything with my memory problems.

From the chapters I have read so far, I can say the book is well written and informative. It really made me think about the subject in a new way.

Back with HBO--for 10 Weeks

My wife and I started watching the Sopranos in the 4th season of that amazing show. I refused to watch it at its debut, despite all of the acclaim it received. I thought a show about a gangster visiting a female therapist would be so unbelievable that it would be just silly. But one night I was in a hotel with nothing to watch on TV so I thought I would try an episode of the Sopranos. As soon as I got home, I rented the first season. My wife and I watched the first three seasons to catch up and subscribed to HBO to watch the fourth season once we were done with the first three.

This led me to watch another HBO phenomenon--"Band of Brothers." My wife was not interested in that one. But from 2002 on I have been an HBO subscriber when they have one of their amazing series on. We watched every episode of "The Wire." I watched "Deadwood." Today I resubscribed because tomorrow the new series "The Pacific" begins. It is produced by the same people who did "Band of Brothers." The preview comments say it is a very different series, but just as intense.

When HBO is good, it is the best thing on TV.

Lawyers, Car Mechanics, Bankers and Chemical Company Execs

We all suffer from stereotypes. Now that race and religion are out of bounds, at least in public, it is still perfectly OK to classify and dismiss people by their profession. In the past few days I have had delightful conversations with people in every one of the professions listed in today's title: Lawyers, Car Mechanics, Bankers and Chemical Company Execs.

I was going to write about something else today, but changed my mind this morning when I picked up my car at the Firestone Dealer on Orange Street in Lancaster where I get all my auto service work done. I dropped the car off early this morning because the brake pedal was feeling "soft." It was fine when I was driving back from New York on the highway, but in slow-moving traffic, the pedal would go almost to the floor. By the way, I drive a 2002 Chevy Malibu with 97,000 miles.

It turns out there was a little rust around the fitting in one of the front brake calipers. They cleaned the fitting, purged the air from the system and did not charge me. Since I had the car serviced in January when I cam back from Iraq, they thought they should have noticed this and said "No charge." Everyone knows the stereotype of auto mechanics. These guys are great.

At an event where I work earlier in the week, I talked with a group of Philadelphia trial attorneys about public speaking. We talked about practice, preparation, and listening to other speakers. Lawyers are easy to pick on, until you need one. And like the lawyers I ride with occasionally, these men and women were a lot of fun to talk with.

On Wednesday night I was at an award dinner in NYC for a chemical industry executive. Again, these guys get vilified by many people, but they make all the ingredients of the stuff we like and the stuff that keeps us alive. Without pure chemicals there would be little medicine, no clean water, and no computers.

After the dinner I talked to a trio of bankers from HSBC who introduced themselves as villains. They had arranged the sale of one of the companies I used to work for to a Saudi company. The result was a viable company instead of a bankruptcy, and many of my old friends who would have lost their jobs are still working because of these bankers.

Later today I am going to see a couple of the guys I deployed with. As a category and personally, I like soldiers too.