Flush with Possibilities

My wife and I take Nigel—on the weekend’s Nigel and Jacari—to the Franklin & Marshall gym with us. The boys play basketball at one of the courts while we run on the upper level track. The track is just over 1/7th mile so we do 20 laps for a 3-mile run and see the kids shooting baskets at the south end of every lap.

Two weeks ago I was running with my wife in the college gym. At lap 10 I told Annalisa I would be turning off at the bathroom on the next lap. I said it in an apologetic way, just because I was slowing us down. She smiled and said, “I’m not disappointed in you but Scott would be.” She was referring to Scott Perry, our battalion commander, who trained himself to use the room with porcelain furniture just three times a day.

If I could ever meet that standard, it has not been in the last 30 years. It made me think about how competitive the smallest details of life in the military can be and how much I thought about trips to the latrine whenever I was in field training or going on a flight.

So I would get up and go to breakfast at least an hour or two before I really needed to get up, because I did not want to be the guy who was praying for the Black Hawk to land or the Humvee to stop because all his bathroom business was not done before the flight. Because every plan needs a contingency plan, I always had an empty 20oz Gatorade bottle with me on flights or convoy training. I never actually used it, but I felt better knowing it was in my right cargo pocket or in my backpack if I needed it.

Military Blogging Conference

On April 9 I will be in Arlington VA for a Military Blogging Conference. Like most conference they will have expert panels. It begins Friday evening with a panel and a cash bar and runs through the entire day of Saturday, April 10. I am mostly interested in the social hour Friday night. I want to meet fellow bloggers and this should be a great place to do it.

and compared to a business conference, registration for the whole thing is $50!

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.