11 years have passed..

The wife and I are glued to the History Channel as the events of that day are played through from hundreds of different angles and viewpoints and even now, more than a decade later how unreal it seems, we are watching that unfurl on TV.  I’m not going to rehash what I was doing back then, those memories have already seen the light of day and are living in my archives.  I’m going to look at what has happened since then.  At that time I was a mechanic at the low end of the pay scale, single, struggling and then, in the space of a smoky morning, I had direction and goals.  On a terrible day, my life took a turn for the better, I found my calling back in skills that I had shelved and in pursuing that new life, I found that I liked taking pictures, writing and eventually, the strange girl of my dream.  Now, 11 years down the road, I’m 2 years out from a retirement, I have friends all over the world. 

So instead of mourning this year, which is hard watching what we are watching, I’m going to celebrate and be thankful for what I have now.   My wife, my friends and my family and the fact that we all made it to the other side.   I haven’t forgotten but do believe we’ve punished those who were responsible, chasing them all over the globe and when they poked their head out from under a rock, squashed them like a bug and now the biggest bug is dead.  Now it’s time to heal and close some of those wounds and go back to being the land of the free.  Get back to being healthy and happy, I don’t know about you, I’m a bit weary about being a nation suffering from PTSD and I’m sure winning hearts and minds only lasts for so long. 

Crap, this blog post is hard to write while I’m watching people jump out of buildings and people screaming.  Anyway, I’m glad we got the main asshat responsible for this.  I’ll never forget but I was raised by a bunch of forgivers, I have no problem forgiving the dead.

My two cents on the book “No Easy Day”

First, you cannot compare it to Wikileaks, that was done by a disgruntled asshat who grabbed as much secret stuff he could and sent gave it to someone to share with the world which probably caused a lot of people to die and he somehow expected not to get into trouble.  If anything, that guy deserves the Darwin Award just for being a dumbass, he purposely wanted to do as much damage as he could.

No Easy Day on the other hand is a story that I bet a fair percentage of the population dreamed about for the last 11 years.  The boogieman was finally caught, I rejoined the military to see this guy taken out and I, for one wouldn’t mind hearing the story.  This is the tallest of tall tales, what we have spent trillions of dollars to accomplish and as me being Joe Public, would like to hear about the end result, unedited and uncut.  Hopefully the truth as told by a highly motivated decorated warrior. 

Some secrets are too big to keep and I’m glad this one is getting aired to the world and I’m looking forward to drinking a cold beer while reading about it.  I’m just wondering about who got the reward and if someone did, did we set him up nice.  That story and Roswell, then I’ll be a happy camper.

8 Years

I’ve written about this before and don’t think I can improve on what I wrote here and here, the details were fresher on my mind. 8 years later and 9/11 was one of those events in my life that totally shaped how my entire future would turn out. Two buildings tumbling down in a city 3000 miles awake shook everything, the repercussions rang the world like a bell and I think that ringing will echo for a long long time. In a sense, my life split in two that day. There was the person I was before which included my early Naval Service then getting out and going to school and taking up work as a mechanic, I was carefree and living for the moment. Then 9/11 where the shock of the events pushed me outside of my life and I looked down at doing and knew, it wasn’t where I was supposed to be at. The next day, I signed back up with the Navy and a couple weeks later, I was back in, minus a rank.

Two years and five months later, I was making my first trip into Iraq and eventually I would spend over 2 years of my life in that desert. This dry and inhospitable place soon became my home away from home, humans can get used to anything. In many ways, in my journeys into the war zone, I was lucky. No one I cared about died nor was I hurt but I could see the toil that repeated trips was were having. To me, to my fellow military members, war changes you and the person who went in isn’t the same person who comes out the other side.

It’s strange to say but for the troops on the ground, this might be the safest war ever conducted. We had the best gear protective gear ever issued to a military force, yes there are deaths but compare the numbers to any other war or any major battle and it’s a drop in the bucket. We were surviving, running through 120 degree heat carrying around 80 pounds of battle gear and more often than not, making it home whole. In body at least. ORM, Operational Risk Management was the key phrase, we get more safety briefs then most people in the civilian world could imagine and as boring as they are, they seem to be working.

So many changes have happened since I came back in, medically, we’re now tracking all of our immunizations online, our notes are now written on a networked system. There are still bugs being worked out but I wonder what the result will be in 10 years? Military medicine in the 90’s was basically unchanging and now, the changes are so fluid and fast moving that if you turn your back, you won't recognise what's waiting for you at your desk.

This month, I’m re-enlisting for probably the last time, I’m 4 and a half years out from my 20 and I’m going to have to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. Hopefully it involves hanging out with the wife and dog alot. I’m proud to have taken part in these great events, when I’m talking to my grand kids, I can say, "I was there", and if they are so inclined, they can come back here and catch a snapshot of what I went though. They’ll see the gaps and wonder, what happened there and I’ll still have a few tales left to tell.

My personal connection to 9/11

I’ve done enough posts about 9/11 that had to do with me so I might as well tell you guys about someone I know. Back in the early 90, right out of Field Medical Service School (the place where Navy Corpsman learn to play with the Marines and about combat medicine), I was assigned to VMFA (AW)-242 at MCAS El Toro and also assigned to the unit right before we left was a wet behind the ears doctor, Lt David Tarantino.

So we went on our wild far east tour and came back and he transferred to a hospital for his residency.

9/11 happens and I drop everything and go back into the military and a couple of months into 2002, I’m in the barracks room of one of my Marines glancing through a Playboy that was sitting there and suddenly there’s picture of Doc standing at a party at the mansion in his dress whites, he had picked up LtCdr since the last time I had see him. Hugh threw a party for the Firefighters and heroes involved in saving lives that day.

Doc was at the Pentagon when the plane hit and rushed into a burning room to save a guy. You can find that story here and here and pictures here (they do a great time of telling what happened and I would do a disservice to the tale telling it again). Definitely the stuff heroes are made out of but then again, part of our job is being a hero when the time comes. He was able to answer the call. I’m glad he made it out alright and I'm glad to call him friend. It’s a small world.

Three years..

Three years ago, I was living in a really small town in northern Arizona called Paulden, had five acres to myself with only 4 pigmy goats, 4 ducks and 4 chickens as company. Work was a 30-mile drive into Prescott. I was still at the early stages of the mechanic trade; it was nice having patients that if they died you just took them to the junkyard.

That morning in particular, I had gotten up at 5:30, eaten eggs and toast for breakfast (from my chickens), fed the animals and hopped into my truck. I turned on my radio and knew immediately that something was very wrong. My radio was tuned to NPR, my primary source of news since I didn't have a TV at the time. The normally calm anchor's voices were shaking and were saying that a plane had crashed into one of the world trade centers. They kept saying the same things over and over so I surfed around the dial, the AM stations were even worse, the news people crying on the air, pretty chaotic. Went through the rest of the FM dial too and the rock stations didn't say anything, which still bothers me. The DJ was a cheery girl that sounded like she didn't have a clue what had happened, just a regular morning broadcast for them. I went back to NPR because they seemed to have the best coverage, if I remember their news anchor was rollerblading towards the Towers. I called the important people in my life and told them to turn on the news, my mom just said, "why are you worried, planes crash all the time". Then she turned on the news and felt silly and called me back.

As with the rest of the United States, I was shocked to my core. I finally got to work and no one was working, everybody was standing around and watching video of the planes crashing into towers. I tried working but life had suddenly turned surreal, nothing I was doing was making any difference. My enchantment with mechanics had faded, the radio was blaring overhead, most of the time repetitive, we would listen to a new morsel of news that would come out every hour or so.

Somehow I did some work that day and got off and went to my best friend Larry's house, he had gotten off work and we just sat and watched the news. People were going to New York from all over and Larry being a reserve firefighter wanted to join them, he was so close to just running out and driving east and I talked him down.

Told him he had 2 kids and a life to take care of, let people that can afford to do it, rush off.
A couple of days later I was back at the same recruiting station that I had joined in 10 prior once more signing my name.

How long will it be before the bruise that was placed on the consciousness fades? Do you remember what it was like to walk up to the first skyscraper after 9/11? Your first flight? Everything changed after that date, the world wasn't as safe as it was and a new sense of paranoia had settled in over everybody.

Since then the paranoia has faded a bit and a sense of complacency has settled in. But we're still a different nation that what we were. There are now new fetters on some of our freedoms, most we don't notice till we run into them. Talk about making bombs too much and chances are the FBI will be knocking on your door. The airport security has been replace by flinty eyed people MIB that pull people off to the side for mysterious reasons and feel them up and traumatizing them to airports for the rest of their lives. And for the last 3 years we have been at war someplace or other.

I don't think that this war on terrorism is something we can win by ourselves, there needs to be a worldwide effort to squish it out and change the way people think. Every time an innocent person dies in this fight there is a chance that you're making another enemy that is willing to sacrifice his or her life for a cause against us.

Look at the Chechnya, the Russians are some pretty hardheaded customers and don't deal with terrorists but their situation is turning into a downward spiral. They're getting closer to the point when it's going to be easier to sterilize the area instead of fighting, once you get to that point, all sides have lost. Violence spreads like a plague. Terrorists aren't playing the same game that they were in the past, there aren't any real demands anymore. These wack jobs just want to put on a show for the media and they don't care if they live or die. They just want to make whoever it is they're dealing with look bad, every body gets hurt but they don't care. How do you fight people like that?

There are many things worth fighting, the problem is that we sometimes forget the real reason we started fighting. Once we become the fight, the fighting becomes more important then the objective and the original objective is lost. At that point it's probably a good idea to take a breather, step back and reassess. Let the emotion of the moment fade before you alienate the people that your good intentions are trying to save.

Sometimes you can't defuse the fanatics and they need to be stomped down, the trick is not to make any more while you're doing it. I just hope someone up there has a plan and knows what they're doing and not deceiving the rest of us. Nothing I hate more then throwing money away by betting on the wrong horse.