The Coldest I Have Ever Been. Ever.

While most of this blog thus far has been me complaining about OTS, there are plenty of great parts to this program. It's just hard to be funny when you are being positive with my sense of humor. To be totally fair, I thought 2/3rds of my Flight were great people (you know who you are on both ends of that fraction). Though profoundly intimidating, the Flight Commanders and OTS staff were also outstanding educators. It is remarkable the changes they were able to affect in five short weeks.

I also thought OTS' commitment to hands on, practical exercises was excellent. There are limits to what one can learn in the classroom so OTS gets us out in the field a good deal. Accordingly, we have a giant Airman Expeditionary Force (AEF) exercise. It is a complete mock deployment into the woods of southern Alabama, meant to prepare us (as much as reasonably possible) for the procedures and stresses of a real deployment.

                                We smile because we have no idea what is in store for us

If you think back to a few weeks ago, you may recall headlines like "COLD WAVE GRIPS NATION" and "ZOMG, COLD." This, of course, included Dixie and Lower Alabama. This, of course, happened at the EXACT time when I was being sent out to live in a tent for a few days.

It was a brisk 25 degrees by the time we were dropped off at the site and it plummeted to a scrotum-retracting 9 degrees by Midnight. This would have been fine for the Arctic Survival School in Fairbanks, Alaska because the staff would have been prepared for the cold and given us appropriate equipment to preclude such conditions such as hypothermia and frostbite.

It was "Triple Dog Dare You" Cold.

But we were not in Arctic Survival School, the staff was not prepared, we had no cold-weather gear, and all sorts of people had frostbite on fingers and toes. I've been in Chicago for almost all of my life. I have felt cold. This transcended all previous levels of cold experienced by my nervous system.

I am thinking that my law firm friends might have to work bad hours, but at least they are not in this tent, snuggled into this fart saturated sleeping bag from 1983, and wearing nine layers of clothes to stay warm.

Cozy, eh?

I thankfully managed to fall asleep after a half hour of convulsive shivering. A few hours later, I was terrifyingly awoken by an unfamiliar sound. It took me a few minutes to figure out that it was C-130 planes practicing nighttime "touch and go" landings on an air strip located pretty much next to our tent city. This means not only were they appallingly close to the ground when they buzzed our location but they kept doing it, over and over and over and over. I mentally drafted an evacuation plan for myself and my roommate in the event that one of these things crashed into our deployment area. Crazy? Perhaps. But it was really cold and these things were really loud.

YOU ARE A LOUD PLANE AT LOW ALTITUDES

The second time I woke up was to an alarming “BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM” of metal on concrete. It was me shivering so violently that I was literally rocking my cot back and forth. It eventually got so cold that some of us moved into the bathroom/shower area because it had heat. In case you were wondering, "sleep in a shower unit" was not one of my "bucket list" things I needed to do before dying.

I could be stealing office supplies from my law firm right now...

We woke up to learn that at least 10 people from our Group (135 people) were being treated for frostbite. In a weird way, it was nice to know that it was actually THAT cold and was not just me being a total pansy.

Despite it all, the exercise commenced. It was a mock CASEVAC (a portmanteu for Casualty Evacuation point). It was a great exercise for the Biomeds because they could treat all the mock patients. It was a great for the Med Service people because they could run the CASEVAC and make sure the trains were running on time. It was great for the Chaplains because mock patients were mock dying and they could do whatever it is that Chaplains do.

You might be thoughtfully stroking your chin at this point in the paragraph and pondering, "what the hell could a bunch of lawyers contribute in a remote CASEVAC?" Good question. The answer is nothing. We could offer no skills to anyone at any point. My reminders that we were all technically Doctors, albeit of the Juris variety, fell upon deaf ears. I'm glad I went $85,000 into debt for a degree that offers such versatility.

They made all the JAGs into either mock patients who had to act out symptoms so we could be treated or into Security Forces that protected the location. For reasons that I can only chalk up to God hating me, I was a SF element leader. This meant while everyone else was in the HEATED medical tents, I was "patrolling" outside. In the cold. In the wind. 


On the plus side, I was issued a to-scale model M-16A2 rifle, M-9 pistol, and a Vietnam-era flak jacket and helmet, so at least I looked like a gigantic tool. It was my job to stop, question, investigate, and search, all of the "injured locals" who were wandering into our camp.