Out of the Cast, Therapy Begins Today

My high-tech arm brace

Today I had went to see my surgeon and to get my first physical therapy session.  The cast came off shortly after I arrived at the office. I got x-rays. The technician doing the x-rays explained very carefully what the doctor needed to see and did her best to make sure I was not in pain. She could see from the previous x-rays that I was a mess or at least my elbow was a mess.

After the x-rays the surgeon came to the exam room. Even with a mask on he had the look of someone who is very happy with their work. He told me that everything looked very solid. He showed me the plates and screws holding it together my humerus bone and my ulna. He told me he had to break the ulna to fix the joint. So, my broken bone count is 40.

The surgeon said the break in my elbow was not because of fragile bones. He said the break would have been the same in a 20-year-old who hit the ground in the same way. That was good to know.

After the doctor left, two medical technicians put me in the device you see in the photo. They said I should keep this on except in the shower. I was happy to know I can take a shower now. It won’t be comfortable sleeping in this, but it won’t be any worse than the cast and the sling.

After the doctor visit, I went to another part of the building and had my first physical therapy session. I will write more about that soon.

Protesting personal protective equipment is sooooooooo American

These guys don't protest helmet rules

In 1981, I was a staff writer at the Elizabethtown Chronicle. I was assigned to write about the anti-helmet law demonstration at the state capital. I was the only motorcyclist on staff and always wore a helmet, so I was not sympathetic with the demonstrators.

I wrote about the demonstration and reported the opinions of the demonstrators as accurately as I could. I remembered some of their arguments from a decade before when I heard the arguments against wearing seat belts. The protesters insisted that riding a motorcycle was just as safe with or without a helmet.

Since it was a weekly newspaper, I had a chance to update my story the next day with a report of the death of a motorcyclist leaving the rally riding home in the middle of the night with a blood alcohol level that made him legally drunk. He died of massive head injuries. Since he was dumb enough to drive a motorcycle while drunk his lifespan was probably destined to be short anyway.

Personal protective equipment has always been controversial in freedom worshipping America. We are free to be as stupid as we want to be. We do not want people to tell us to wear masks or seatbelts or helmets or safety glasses or wash our hands.

We wear personal protective equipment for ourselves and for those who love us and for those who could be hurt if we don’t as in the case of facemasks. The trouble is there is no dramatic feedback for safety. We wear a seat belt and walk away from an accident that could have killed us.

There is an old proverb that says above all do not become a proverb. Do not be that blind man who refused safety glasses at work. And do not be the motorcyclist who protested helmet laws and died on the way home of massive head injuries. Fifty years post mortem you are still a proverb.

Fighting Frigates and Main Battle Tanks Have Some Things in Common

B-13, "Bad Bitch" my tank, 1975-78

The Movie Poster

Royal Navy frigates in the early 1,800s and modern main battle tanks have a few things in common. For instance, if you want to increase morale on a fighting ship do more got to re-practice. Firing cannons and small arms makes the crew happier.  For the past year I have been reading the Master and Commander Series of novels by Patrick O’Brian. I am now reading the 20^th novel in this series which is the last novel by O’Brian himself. There is a short 21^st novel. O’Brian died while writing it in the year 2000. It was finished by a friend of the author.

I watched the movie long before I knew that the novels existed. The movie Master and Commander starring Russell Crowe debuted in 2003. I have watched it several times sense including just last week. Now that I have read nearly all the books the movie is a pretty good summary.

As I read the novels, I thought a lot about life in a tank. Asked with the frigate the crew is very close together. Both of the main battle tank and a frigate are fighting machines designed around getting their cruise to the battle with as much firepower as possible. As with the movie Fury, many crew members of frigates Think of sailing a fighting ship has the best job they ever had.

In sea battles between wooden frigates can last for hours, but they can also be as short sharp and violence as modern tank battles. The battles are often at very close-range including boarding and fighting hand to hand until one ship surrenders.

In the 4000+ pages of the 20 novels the author spends a lot of time describing sailing in excruciating detail. He knows how every sail on the ship is rigged and used to make the ship faster and maneuver it. He also follows the two main characters through their entire professional lives. Capt. Jack Aubrey and Dr. Steven Mathurin are very different man who develop a lifelong friendship that the novels follow. They go through great ups and downs of fortune and love and loss in success and failure.

And as with the sailing novels my best friends of my life I met while serving as a tank commander.

I had no particular interest in sailing before I read the first novel. But after I started reading the story was so good, I read 20 novels inside of a year. I could not recommend more highly. And if novels are not your thing the movie is wonderful.

Gettysburg: Corona Movie Seven

The next movie in our Corona Virus Film Festival at home is the movie Gettysburg.  Clocking in at more than four hours, we split the viewing between two days. 

I saw the movie when it was released in 1993 and again early in the 2000s on DVD. I had forgotten how long it is and how didactic. Throughout the movie are speeches about why both sides are fighting the war. I think anyone who is sympathetic with the Confederate cause would find these speeches painful. I liked them and I don't like anything about the rebel cause. 

In the course of the movie, the professors who take up arms are treated with respect.  Learning in general is treated well.  There is a strong anti-intellectual strain in American life, but in this movie the learned men like Colonel Chamberlain are treated with respect and last-in-his-West-Point-class George Pickett is the butt of jokes.  The scene in which Pickett denies evolution is wonderful.  The scene in which General Hancock talks to Chamberlain about his friend General Armistead is beautiful and sad. 

For spectacle, the movie is just amazing. Hundreds of re-enactors line up shoulder to shoulder to attack Little Round Top. Thousands march across a mile of open fields at the end of the movie in Pickett's charge.  Dozens of cannon fire rolling barrages from the Confederate guns, answered by dozens more on the Union side. 

A quick search of "Lee Longstreet Gettysburg" shows the deep debate about how the double disaster of Little Round Top and Pickett's Charge happened. It also shows how the disagreement portrayed in the movie and the novel on which it is based could have unfolded between the two men. 

My first visit to Gettysburg was just a year after I returned to America from three years as a tank commander on the East-West border in Germany. We spent a lot of time training at or near the border deciding where our tanks should be placed for the best field of fire. Anytime my tank was on the move in the German countryside, I was scanning for a place to get out of the line of fire of an approaching enemy and looking for where to go if an attack suddenly occurred.

With my head full of fire and maneuver, seeing the route of Pickett's attack was stunning.  How anyone survived that assault, I don't know. 

The movie shows Lee believing his men could cross that mile of open field sloping upward and prevail over men with cannon hiding behind a stone wall. As an American, I am glad Lee was bold to the point of foolishness.  The defeat at Gettysburg was certainly not the end of the will of the slave-owning states to fight, but it was the end of any real hope for victory, and for that I am endlessly grateful. 

Movies in the Time of Corona: Blue, White, Red--A Trilogy

As part of my personal Corona Film Festival, I watched the trilogy Blue, White, Red:  Three Colours. 

These magnificent stories of love are in French, mostly set in France.  The second movie is set more in Poland and with more Polish than French, but begins in France. They have the same Polish director, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and were released in consecutive years in the mid-90s.  In each of the the three movies, the story is most clear in the face of the star--the three faces you see in the poster above. 

The camera lingers on the faces of Juliette Binoche, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Irene Jacob in each of the three movies.  Each deals with love and loss in ways that surprised me--especially in the second movie, White.

I watched them in order of release but they could be watched separately in any order.  The lead characters express so much with their faces that I am going to watch at least parts of the movies again without subtitles, just to see how much I can understand.  I was surprised as I watched White that I was picking up words and phrases in Polish. I don't know Polish, but it is a Slavic language and when spoken slowly, the sounds of some common words is very like Russian. 

Birthday Rides!!! 67km of Fun at 67 Years Old

The Ben Franklin Bridge, connecting Philadelphia and Camden

For my 67th birthday, I rode 67 km in four separate rides, mostly on hills across half of Pennsylvania.  On May 1, I drove to Philadelphia, stopping about halfway on the 80-mile drive, at the intersection of Pa. Routes 23 and 10.  Just south of that crossroad is a 2.5-km hill I really like. Usually when I travel to Philadelphia I am on a train, but since I was driving I could stop, and ride up and down this hill. 

After that ride, I drove to center city Philadelphia, parked on the Delaware Water Front and rode for a few hours.  I rode back on forth across the Ben Franklin Bridge, then across the city to West River Drive. This four-lane road is closed to traffic on weekends from March to October, but now it is closed to cars all the time.  I rode with walkers, runners and other riders with a lot of space to stay far apart.  I went all the way to City Line Avenue before turning around and taking a different way back to the Delaware River, and riding the Ben Franklin Bridge again. 

On the way home I pulled off the Turnpike at Morgantown to ride the Rt. 10 hill again--faster up and down than the morning. 

Today, May 2, I drove to a small town near Gettysburg to visit my son at a job site where he is working. He is part of a crew that is hanging overhead doors on a loading dock.  They were just finishing hanging 60 doors this week.

Then I drove to Fort Loudon and rode up and down Tuscarora Summit.  I rode the five-mile climb faster than I have since before knee replacement in March of last year.

What better way to celebrate my 67th birthday than riding 67 kilometers and climbing 1200 meters? 

Three Tankmen, Три Танкистa--A Soviet Song About a Tank Crew

There are not a lot of songs about tank crews.  The 75th Anniversary of VE Day is very soon. Here is a song about those of us who are Tankmen: Танкистa!

“The Three Tankmen”

It is a very famous song. It was made in the time when a large danger of a war with Japan was real. 
Japan militaries acted very impudently so the two border conflicts - in the region of the Khasan Lake 
in 1938 and in the region of Khalkhin Gol (in the West it is known as “Nomongan conflict”) in 1939, - 
occurred. In both the conflicts Japanese invasions on Soviet territory (Mongolian one in the second 
case) were repelled by Red Army. It looks like the song was made on the basis of the events in the 
region of the Khasan Lake.

This song was sang in the famous pre-war movie “Tractor men”. A former military gets the post of 
the team-leader of the tractor men’s group, tightens up discipline and learns his subordinates to 
prepare to be drivers of tanks in the case of an enemy invasion.

This song stayed very popular and during WWII. I read memoirs of the WWII veteran who recalled 
how a Soviet tankman played on a bayan and singed this song in a captured German town in 1945.

********************************************************************************************

“The Three Tankmen”

(Translated by Andrey)

Some lowering black clouds move on the state border,
The inclement land is filled by silence.
The high banks of the Amur River are securing by
The sentries of the Motherland who are standing there.
The sentries of the Motherland who are standing there.

A firm covering force is placed there against an enemy.
A valiant and strong unit is standing
Nearly the border of the Far Eastern land - 
It is an armored shock battalion.
It is an armored shock battalion.

Three tankmen, three merry friends, 
They are the crew of a combat vehicle,
Live there like an inviolable firm family –
And the song guarantees that it is true.
Three tankmen, three merry friends, 
They are the crew of a combat vehicle.

Some thick dew fell on grass,
Wide fogs fell on a ground.
Samurais decided to cross the border 
Nearly the river in this night.
Samurais decided to cross the border 
Nearly the river in this night.

But the intelligence reported exactly
And the powerful unit was given by an order and became to move
On the native Far Eastern land -
It was the armored shock battalion.
It was the armored shock battalion.

Tanks were rushing, raising a wind,
The redoubtable armor was advancing.
And Samurais were falling to a ground
Under the pressure of steel and a fire.
And Samurais were falling to a ground
Under the pressure of steel and a fire.

And all the enemies were eliminated - and the song guarantees that it is true, -
In the fire attack
By three tankmen, three merry friends,
Who are the crew of a combat vehicle!
By three tankmen, three merry friends,
Who are the crew of a combat vehicle!

1938