Update V

Another week's Update.

Some good stuff this week, not all of it for the faint of heart. I am going to get a little graphic this week, but I think that the tone will be pretty light, hopefully no one will fall out.

A quick bit of admin business first, I have put up the older Updates here: http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc If you want to see something older, or someone wanted to see, that's where they're at.

It continues to get colder. I keep talking to people about how the rain will come soon. Everyone is getting ready, preparing plans to raise all of their equipment by 6-12 inches. No one has things moved yet, since it would really be kind of a pain right now, but getting ready all the same. All my books are on the bottom shelf, I am getting ready to change that up, let me tell you.  The worst thing that can happen to an already pretty guy-smelling room is to add a bunch of rotting books.

Well, nearly the worst thing. I told this story to Margaret and she said that she thought I shouldn't add it to the Update this week, but I told her that I kind of liked the story and it DOES show how things work here a bit. So here it is: I have to set it up with a couple of points. First, I've been reading a lot of Elmore Leonard, whom I recommend. He's good and smart and fun. One of the things that his characters do, they think everything through beforehand. I mean, there is a situation where a guy might get into a fight and he thinks about the fight, he thinks about how he might handle it and what things he would use or how he would talk beforehand. It's not really planning, it's just the usual thinking about things that people do. (Or at least, I do it and Elmore Leonard's characters do it, I assume we are not alone.) (Furthermore, while I am going on and on about Elmore Leonard, I really, really recommend the show Justified. It was on FX and I suspect is out on DVD now. Netflix it. It's based on an Elmore Leonard character that is in 2 books and a short story and it is really excellent. There is a song that they play over the last scene that isn't good. Other than that, perfect.) That's point one for setup. Point two is a little more extreme, I guess. On deployment you have a bunch of guys who are not spending any quality time with women and ARE spending a hell of a lot of time crammed together in close quarters. There is an awful lot of homo-erotic "humor." It isn't really humorous, I mean not really funny. It's more something that lets off a bit of steam. When I was first exposed to it, in Okinawa, I was really creeped out and felt that it was a bridge WAY too far. But over time I have pretty much gotten used to it. It's just the way guys in the military are.

At any rate, after all that preamble, the other morning I was in my rack. I was reading an Elmore Leonard book and I was in a sleeping bag, about half zipped. My buddy Cahill popped through the blankets that are hung up as my walls and  stood staring at me for a second. I raised an eyebrow and said, "Yes?" And he acted like he was crying, took his shirt off and said in a crying voice, "I'm sorry, just let it happen." (As if, you see, he was about to sexually molest me. Again, not funny ha ha, but amusing for that kind of thing.) Then he said, "What would you do, if that happened." Curious now, see? Like he'd just thought about the reality of it, after he had already made as if it was real. And, because I was specifically thinking about things like that, the process for things, I said, "I'd lean forward and grab the lamp (a clip lamp) and as I fell backwards, when you pulled my leg, I'd crack it across your face and break your nose." And he thought about that for a second and said, "You'd us the lamp?" And I looked around and said, "Yeah, I have a knife, but it's farther away, I don't want to break any of my computer stuff, this book is too light. I'd use the lamp." He said, "Would that be strong enough?" He was putting his shirt back on now, getting ready to sit on the foot of my cot. "And I pulled the lamp down and gave it a little swing. "Yeah, it'd break your nose." "Huh," he said, "yeah, I guess that'd work." And then we just talked about work and then he went to bed. Really, really foreign, right? But exactly what it is like to live in a tent with 10 guys.

The other big story from the week, and this one is really kind of upsetting, so I warn you again. I was on duty a couple of nights ago and we got a couple of guys in on an IED blast. One was a US guy and one was an ANA. (Afghan National Army) They were being helicoptered in, so they were in bad shape. (Category A, we say. That's really, really bad shape.) When someone comes in, I go out and stand with the team in the Emergency Department (ED) and take down tracking and personal information while they do the actual medical work. The ANA guy was torn up really badly. There was brain matter on the gurney and the bed. He had lots of torn-upedness. But that was ok. I stood there while they evaluated him. He was very unconscious and it was fine. Then I went over to the US guy. He was awake, sitting up and talking and he had no face. From under his chin to his hairline, from ear to ear, there was just a mask of blood. When he spoke he spit blood, his teeth occasionally shone through the mist of red. His eyes were the big concern and they were squeezed shut. The doctors were asking him questions about what had happened and things. Then someone said, "What his pain?" This is one of those standard medical questions, "On a scale of zero to ten, with zero being no pain at all and ten being the worst pain you have ever felt, how much pain do you have." Clinical personnel say it 20 times a day. So one of the nurses asked the guy, "How much pain do you have?" And he said, "Uh, a four." Well it couldn't have been a four, that's what I thought, that's what everyone thought, so they asked him the full question, "On a scale of zero to ten, with zero being no pain at all and ten being the worst pain you have ever felt, how much pain do you have." He said, "OH! In that case, four." I started to smile, but at the same time, I started, for the first time since I have been here, to get dizzy. Watching him talk and spit and just live in blood like that was getting to me. So they wrote his pain as a four and I went back over to see the ANA. (Note, for non-medical folks, the poor guy had probably been given morphine on the flight over. That would make his pain an awful lot less than it would be later. It LOOKED horrible, but he was speaking and sitting up on his own. I'm sure it was awful, but not the end of his world. He left for Germany the next day and is probably back in the States right now, with his family.)  And that's one of the things that really struck me. I was more comfortable looking at the ANA guy, the guy with brains literally coming out of his head, than I was looking at the guy with no face. I don't know what that's all about. Is it the race issue? Am I more comfortable seeing another guy in pain, but not an American? Was it just that the ANA guy was knocked out, just waiting to die? Was that what it was? I don't know.  The other thing that struck me was that Hollywood doesn't know what they are doing. They get really close to the effect, but they just don't get it. Tom Savini, the premiere effects guy in Hollywood, does good work. (He's not one of the CGI guys. He's a make-up effects guy. He does all the horror movies.) He gets it close, but anyone who has seen a movie with horror tones has seen someone with no face and what is missing is the blood. There is always some blood in the movies, but not to the degree that there is in real life. In real life, your body is still pushing blood to the skin that isn't there. It pumps it and pumps it and there is nothing to keep that blood from running through the meat of your face and into your mouth and onto your shirt. It's really, really disturbing. And, to jump backwards, makes people pretending that they are going to molest you seem less scary in comparison.

Finally, in the news that I know you have all been waiting for, it looks like Britain's X Factor show is even worse than American Idol.  I know that some people like American Idol, and I call these people my sister-in-law Suzie, but you should know that as much scorn as I have possibly shown towards it, there are far worse things in the world. (And by that I mean X Factor. You cannot believe that people watch this on purpose, but every weekend one of the Brits puts it on and watches to the end. Are they ok? Do they know what good singing sounds like?)

And pop-culture recommendations: I have beaten Elmore Leonard to death, but there are other things I have been enjoying lately. If you like 14 year old boy humor, The Inbetweeners is great. It's a British show about 16 year olds, but it perfectly captures that gross, embarrassing teen time. And I watched a movie called Daybreakers this morning, with Ethan Hawke as a vampire, but it was pretty great. Way smarter than a vampire movie should be. I recommend, if you like that sort of thing.

And that's another week come to a close. We will discuss again next week.