Lest We Forget (5 page)

We stumble back to the parking lot feeling slightly defeated.  As we look to our right the beams of golden light shine down from the heavens on the building next to CVS. The sign reads, "Kwicker Liquor.”  We look at each other and all have the exact same thought at the exact same time.

"
Sooooo you guys wanna just get fucked up?"  

"Sounds good!"

We roll into this place with the verve of a pack of nine year olds entering a Toys-R-US!  Except for Chris, he was only twenty so we made him wait in the truck.  We emerged victoriously with two 30 racks of liquid gold. Pabst. Blue. Ribbon.  "This should get us through the morning, what do you think Chris?"

I’m not going to lie to you
; the rest of that weekend is a little blurry.  I do recall, however, Chris pulling the most clutch move I have ever seen a 20 year old pull off in a bar.  He somehow danced his way into the center ring of the entire girls water polo team from University of Arizona.  They were in Florida for a tournament, or at least that is the story that they told us.  They invited us to watch their next game in two days in Tallahassee.  Chris got their numbers and we actually managed to meet up with them after their game. As the other three men on that trip are all now happily married I will omit the details of the remainder of that evening out of respect for their wives.  I will say that getting to shave Matt’s laced open head before formation on Monday was a real treat. That wound should have definitely received stitches.  Years later at his wedding he would retell the story and showed me the massive scar that he still has.

Escorting Matt to our hotel room

Hanging out with the girls water polo team

…..

Panama City was our first long weekend trip of our holdover time at Regiment but there was several others that were just as memorable.  We had a long weekend on Valentine
’s Day and Jess invited us to go back home to Kansas with him.  Since a big reason why I joined the military was to see new places, I naturally jumped at the opportunity.  Once again Jess, Matt, Chris and myself were set free to have our way with an unsuspecting city.  Jess had been dating the same girl back home for awhile and for some reason thought that having her be our designated driver on Valentine’s Day weekend was a good idea.  Of course we weren’t going to try to talk him out of it, we were just hopeful that she had a few morally casual friends that wanted to hang out.  The first few nights were pretty status quo.  We spent the bulk of our meager months pay on bar tabs and junk food at 2am.  Valentine’s Day was the final evening that we were in town.  Someone must have talked some sense into Jess because he decided to leave us at his friend’s house with a couple cases of beer while he took his girlfriend out to dinner.  This would have been a smart move except we were told that his friend had a new female roommate that wasn’t currently home. 

The two cases of
Bud Light were just enough to get us riled up.  I’m pretty sure that Matt and I tried to fight each other in the living room.  Chris broke us up and I went into the bathroom to cool down.  When I was in there I noticed a shadow box filled with various sailor knots.  It seemed to me that the bowline was not done correctly so I felt the need to tie everything in that bathroom that was long enough into the proper bowline.  Lucky for me this girl that I had never met had several curling irons, hair dryers and other electronic devices with long cords.  When I ran out of things to tie I began rearranging everything that wasn’t bolted down into a giant pyramid.  I must have been in that bathroom for an hour.  By the time I stumbled out Matt and Chris had already passed out on the couches in the living room.  I decided that my best course of action would be to pass out naked in front of the mystery girl’s bedroom door in anticipation of her arrival.  Don’t bother trying to understand the cognitive process of a 21-year-old Ranger private with over 20 beers on board.

Unbeknownst to me
, blondie came home while I was in the middle of destroying her bathroom.  I didn’t find this out until I heard a very loud scream coming from her room and she ran out, tripping over me.  Apparently Matt had wandered into her bedroom mistaking it for the latrine and commenced relieving himself on the keyboard to her desktop computer.  When she screamed, “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? WHO ARE YOU?”  Matt replied with, “Don’t worry, I’m Jess’ buddy.”  Now, she had never met Jess before.  In fact she had just moved in within the last month.  So in under a minute she is startled awake by one guy pissing on her Dell, trips over another guy naked in her doorway and flees to her bathroom for refuge to find the whole fucking place tied into bowline knots.  Needless to say we were not invited back.  I heard she moved out soon after.

……

Chapter 5 -
Cuts Marked in the March of Men

The fun and games of holdover would have to come to an end so the fun and games of Special Operations Medic School could commence. 

"MEDIC!!!" 

I hear the scream from within the woodline. This is it, the final practical hands on exam for trauma lanes for Special Operations Medical Course (SOMC).  This is the culmination of months of comprehensive hands on training and 40 hours a week in a classroom.  The next 30 minutes will determine whether or not I get to advance on to the one-month clinical rotation or I get washed out.  There are 300 points total, of which there are a handful of immediate disqualifiers or "No-Go's" if missed.  We have been going over this sequence for weeks in the woods of Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  Every possible scenario, every imaginable injury has been covered by our instructors, guys that have been operating as Special Ops medics for years.

             
The first three months of the course is focused heavily on didactics.  We go through anatomy, physiology, pathology, kinesiology, pharmacology and every other "ology" there is.  I laughed on the first day when the instructor said that this course would be like trying to drink from a fire hose.  It didn't take long to figure out what he meant.  The amount of information that we were responsible for learning was incredible.  It wasn't abnormal to have three or four tests on the same day.  It was equivalent to taking 60 college credits in 6 months. 

The attrition rate is one of the highest of any school in the military.  Every guy here had previously passed a rigorous physical test
; it was an eclectic mix of bad asses.  The majority of our class was comprised of guys in the "Q-course" who had passed Special Forces selection and were en route to getting their Green Beret.  If they successfully passed this course they would still have to complete several other phases of training before receiving their Special Forces tab and Green Beret.  There were about a half a dozen Seals that had just endured six months of BUDs, and a handful of Marine Recon Corpsman that had to pass Recon selection.  There were about a half a dozen Rangers in our class, all guys that I had gotten to know pretty well during our time as holdovers after RIP. There were also a couple of members of an Army Civil Affairs unit and two staff sergeants from the Air Force.  One of the Air Force members was a female, who, to my knowledge, was the first female to be admitted to any course like this in the military.  Additionally, we had a couple of members of Special Forces units from two different countries.

The academic portion had wiped out nearly half of our class.  If they were deemed to be "trainable" they would recycle and have the opportunity to start again.

Before we get to trauma lanes we lose a couple more class members during our live tissue labs.  This phase of training is what truly separates special operations medics from all of the other pre-hospital medical training programs. This type of training has been seen as controversial due to the outrage by organizations like PETA.

             
Before we conduct any training on the animals we spend considerable time learning their anatomy.  Every precaution is taken so that they feel absolutely no pain or discomfort.  We administer a heavy sedative before intubating.  From this point forward we were not allowed to refer to the patient as a goat, we were told that they were a 9-year-old child and were to be treated as such.  Over the next two weeks I didn't see a single incident that involved the disrespect or abuse of those patients.  Every member of our class conducted themselves with the highest degree of professionalism.

The first week was general skills.  We were divided into four
-man teams.  Each team would have it's own patient each day.  We would each do a series of four to five surgical procedures starting with the least invasive and working our way to more invasive.  We did our best to put into action the procedures that we had practiced on mannequins in the preceding weeks.  We made use of the external carotid arteries and used the smaller vessels to practice the venous cut down, which involved cutting and blunt dissecting the tissue around a vein in order to expose it.  This was necessary in the event that peripheral venous access could not be obtained and fluids had to be administered intravenously.  (In a separate live tissue lab years later we learned several forms of interoseous fluid administration techniques on pigs.)  I lost count of the number of surgical cricothyrotomy and tracheostomy’s performed.  Tube thoracotomy was also done multiple times per day.  We would finish each day with a hemorrhage lab where an instructor would severe a major artery and we would be responsible for stopping the bleeding.  The ability to perform this skill alone has saved the lives of countless human beings, including enemy combatants.

The following week we would be tested on each of the skills.  Most of the class did well through this phase due largely to the way that the course is taught.  On the last day we take the
caprine to the incinerator.  As we are stacking them in, one of the German Special Forces soldiers made the comment that if we stack them a certain way we can fit more in.  Our jaws drop to the floor and Adam, one of the Green Berets who was re-classing from Special Forces weapons Sergeant to Special Forces medical Sergeant, burst out laughing so hard that he literally fell to the ground.  Within an instant the rest of us followed suit.  Tears rolled from my eyes as I tried to catch my breath.  Our 6'4" German friend has no clue why we are laughing. 

"What is funny?"
he asks earnestly.

"You're fucking joking right?"

"No, what is funny?"

"The German guy giving advice on how to fit more bodies into an incinerator, come on man! Your military has some experience in that kind of thing do they?"

We can see the embarrassment in his eyes.  He didn't think about it in that way at all. 

He replies, "We don't speak of that time in our history."

"What do you mean you don't speak of it?" asks one of the Seals.

"It is taboo, we don't discuss it."

Not one among us feels bad about busting his balls.  Later that night we buy him a beer and continue to joke with him about it.  I believe it was his first experience with American soldiers sense of humor.

             
With live tissue training done it is time to move on to the most physically demanding part of the Special Operations Medic Course.  We would spend each day for the next three weeks in the sweltering heat of the North Carolina woods.  All of which would culminate in a single thirty-minute assessment of our ability to perform in an austere environment.

             
I respond to the call for "MEDIC!"