Pack and Safety

My boots are broken in and I've been hiking and pack training in order to meet the requirements for arduous duty set out by the feds for wildland fire work. On June 6th I'll be taking the test itself and a required yearly in service safety refresher. On June 13th I head down to Douglas Massachusetts to do some crew specific training in order to work on the Massachusetts Wildland Crew. After that I should be eligible to respond to wildland events nationwide and in Canada. Hopefully the rain will stop so I can get an after work hike in tomorrow morning.....

Drama Queen

"Shes a drama queen." The mother warns me as we approach her screaming nine year old daughter.
"Well what happened?" I ask. The girl is laying under the monkey bars with a sweater rolled up under her head, covered in a blanket litterally screaming her head off.
The mother hikes her baby up on her hip and says "She fell off the monkey bars and she could have hurt herself but shes such a drama queen I can't tell." Five minutes earlier a woman in an orange shirt had come running into the fire station to tell us that we needed to go for a "child down" up at the school.
I finally get over to the girl and her screaming doesn't stop. I try to ask her what happened and she yelps "Will I be able to go to school, what if I broke my arm?"
I try, unsucessfully, to get a meaningful history out of her before simply deciding to put her on a backboard. BT grabs a spine board kit and we get her immobilized as the deputy chief pulls up and I learn the girl's right arm hurts. When I cut her sweatshirt I see no swelling or deformity but I slide a pillow and a rolled towel under it for comfor.
The screaming continues nonstop along with questions about whether or not she will be able to go to school and "Ohmygodwhatifitsbroken!!!!!" repeated at near ear splitting decibels.
The woman in the orange shirt shows up and yells "You shouldn't move her, what if she hurt her neck."
I just turn to look at her, at a loss for words before finding a response. The chief chimes in "Well we can't do X Rays here."
At the mention of X Rays the girl starts screaming about radiation poisioning and I wonder briefly what kind of childhood she has.
She and her family are from about an hour north of my town so we have to transport to the hospital they prefer which is way out on 126, Huggins Hospital. On the ride in she screams and yells about every bump but often gets mad enough to forget the pain in her arm because of the velcro on her forehead due to the backboard straps.
I just calmly talk to her and try to soothe her by making my voice the audible imbodiement of a Hindu cow. It doesnt work.
When we finally get her to the hospital and turn her over to the staff I get the "Oh, gee thanks so much"-- look from the receiving RN. The girl complains that the light in the room is too bright and she wants to be off the board. Again she asks if she can still go to school because she has important projects to do.
I refrain the urge to tell her she is nine years old, nothing is important. Instead I leave to do my paperwork.
Not even to the door, an SUV pulls into the ambulance bay. Out pops a guy in a suit covered in blood and his wife. They wrestle open the backdoor and pull out a frail old woman wearing no pants with blood pouring out of her rectum.
Instantly the man's wife is in my face. "She's lost about two pints of blood and I think she's arresting." The old woman is calm, smiling even, as her son carries her in and plops her into a wheelchair. BT and I help get her into Huggins' trauma room and then finally find our way out of there.
On the way back we watch the sky darken and rain begin to pelt the windshield of the ambulance.

And The Point of It All Is?

Jonny began the journey back to Iraq today.
Last night over dinner he talked about the country and the mission of the military and the whole shebang. He said that the vast majority of the people there are ignorant, uneducated with no real chance to ever do better than eek out a subsistence living. Because of their ignorance their views are closed minded and difficult to change. Everything is tribal and patriarchal, women are treated horrendously and pretty much everyone has a hidden agenda.
In short, the whole country is stuck in the middle ages.
Which got me thinking (yep I'm gonna vent but my next posts will be about pretty flashing lights, fires and blood and gore, don't worry) what the hell are we doing over there? Our last president couldn't find Osama Bin Ladden, the guy responsible for the 9/11 attacks so he did what any good politician would do, he strapped on his Texas Six Shooter, put on a flight suit and flew a fighter jet onto a carrier and beat the shit out of a fifth world nation under the banner of "human rights" well for the years since the end of the first Gulf War we really could have cared less about the human rights problem in Iraq. But then magically we have the right to commit a war crime (yes invading a sovereign nation without provocation is a UN war crime for which Bush will never be tried) when public oppion dwindles on the hunt for bin Ladden.
So now countless friends and family members are trying to change thousands of years worth of culture in order to place a barely functioning form of government in effect in a place where Church and State are one. The theocratic regime that rules the Mid East knows no boarders just as the Papacy knew no boarders in the Middle Ages. American troops with sophisiticated weaponary and equipment are not going to change the way of thinking in that area just like armed Middle East troops invading America would not change our way of thinking.
When American troops leave Iraq, and in my oppinion it can't come soon enough, the puppet government we set up over there WILL crumble. They will go right back to slitting each others throats because they don't fear God the same way and they always will.
America was founded on relgious tolerance yet we force our own ideals on other nations because their standards of decency don't measure up to ours. We have no real right to go to Iraq and say "You know how you've lived for the past thousand years, well its wrong. Do it like this."
I often piss my wife off because I call myself a liberal and she feels that views such as I am expressing now are closed minded and very conservative because I am basically preaching isolationism. And maybe this is a new form of isolationism but I really don't see how we can look at a culture that has sustained itself for thousands of years and think we can change it in any amount of time with any amount of firepower. If armed troops came here and told us how to live we would fight tooth and nail to send them packing and we would never submit to their ideals. Why should we expect anything less from a far more violent culture with litterally nothing to loose.
Religion is so imbued into the politics of the Mid East that we can never sepperate the two. So what is the point of sending people like my brother in law to an area that will never change?

Be Back Soon

Jonny heads back to the desert this coming Friday. I'll have more posts up and available for readers in a few days. Today I'm off for some deep sea fishing.....

Home for a bit

Two days ago, my brother in law Jonny Priestly came home on furlough. He's out of Iraq for two weeks.....Let the party begin