PTSD

Estimates that as many as 52,000 of the troops returning from Iraq may suffer PTSD (reference Veterans for America website). Regardless of the number, there is no doubt that many soldiers suffer from this condition.

Recent NPR reports from Daniel Zwerdling brought to light conditions at Ft. Carson Colorado, where soldiers that had PTSD were being denied treatment and harassed and mistreated if they admitted to having a problem.

One soldier fought back and won a courtmartial case they were bringing against him, and in the process, started helping other veterans that were afflicted and persecuted by the Army. He is now working for Veterans for America in Denver and his name is Andrew Pogany.

Everyone remembers the scene from the movie Patton, supposedly based on a true story, where a shell shocked soldier is slapped around by General Patton and called a coward because he wasn't really wounded. This famous example is typical of how people feel about the disease, even those that suffer through it. Certainly, the thought that men's minds can erode or snap under the pressure of combat is a terrifying thought to military strategists, trainers, and commanders. How are we to successfully conduct a war if the process disrupts the abilities of the main tool we use to fight, the soldier? In war, we use equipment and plan for the certainty that it will eventually wear out and break through repeated use without any maintenance, yet we don't treat our soldiers as if they are capable of wearing out or breaking. My analogy is ironic, because I am proposing to treat soldiers more humanely by treating them more like machines.

I was listening to a podcast about a University of Lubeck (Germany) experiment where slow wave oscillations were put into subjects heads through electrodes as they fell asleep. These waves simulate the natural waves that people's brains generate as they fall asleep. Researchers speculate that this is an indicator, or the evidence of the way the brain consolidates the activities of the day into long term memory. Many scientists have questioned the purpose of sleep, and a few have theorized that this is when the brain organizes itself and maintains its health. A recent study of a family group with an affliction robbing them of sleep showed that increasingly erratic behavior, memory problems, and eventually death resulted from a prolonged loss of sleep.

I think that this is part of combat induced PTSD. I speculate that a combination of lack of sleep, high degrees of stress from extreme survival instinct, and having to deal with a situation that is just incompatible, contradictory, and intractable would imbalance most people's minds. I believe that the sleep disruption is interrupting the proper integration of soldier's memories and thoughts into their minds. When they do sleep, the hair trigger they acquire to assist with their survival is disrupting their sleep patterns. They have a huge load of mental material to process. They think they are doing their patriotic duty for a country that doesn't appreciate them, and doesn't want them there. They are told they are in the country to help the people that are trying to kill them. They go out to do missions each day, which they cannot refuse, because they are in the military, and their instincts are telling them that this is dangerous and stupid and they should not go out there into the danger, but their sense of duty gives them no choice. They watch friends die and wonder if there is any point in their sacrifice. They listen to their training briefings about how the enemy will attack them, then they see that their threat is everywhere, or the enemy changes tactics. They are in a no-win situation. Does anyone think that a sane person can endure an insane situation long without being infected by it?

Those that come back and do seek and get help for PTSD are taught about their triggers. These triggers are sounds, smells, sights, or some kind of stimuli that puts them back in the mental situation of their distress. They often can't sleep and self medicate to escape the continued stress. Some describe feeling as if the bad situations they endured in combat will not quit happening in their mind. They keep replaying and repeating, keeping the stressors fresh in their mind. One form of treatment exposes the soldiers to their triggers in a safe environment, being told over and over that the environment is safe. Eventually, they can dismantle or decrease their own triggers. Therapy alone has helped many PTSD sufferers get some relief from their condition. Others benefit from time, which seems to erode the condition down to a less severe level. Some never really get better, and many commit suicide.

I believe that the slow wave oscillation inducer could be used in conjunction with therapy to help cure the condition. I think that the brain gets off track and cannot get back to the point where it can incorporate what is happening. With some external reinforcement, perhaps the restful, restoring sleep can be reinitiated and the soldier can begin to assimilate the things that happened and understand and accept them.

Perhaps this therapy could be used in the field. Once a soldier is removed from danger and provided adequate security during sleep, these devices could be made available to the soldier. If the use of externally boosted slow wave oscillators improves memory, as the studies indicate, it could have an additional benefit. Besides not allowing the sleep patterns to become disrupted in the first place, it could help soldiers remember and assimilate the things that happened during the day. If the mind works on the problems of the dangers it faces during the waking hours while it sleeps, perhaps the solutions of how to avoid dangers will come more naturally, and our soldiers will get better at avoiding dangers and surviving their combat experience. And maybe they can then come home, healthy and whole and enjoy the reward of a normal life that they have more than earned through their service.

Preserve What's Important

I was listening to a podcast this morning where a 9 year old girl whose parents were going through a divorce was asking for help and understanding in her difficult times.

She was asking for advice, and trying to somehow make her parents get back together. The question was, what advice would you give to her.

Without thinking, I thought "Preserve What's Important". My advice wasn't to the little girl, it was to her parents. If they have to be apart the most important thing they can preserve is their daughter's love.

Then I realized that the axiom was a simple statement of what I believe.

I consider myself an environmentalist, interested in preserving the environment in general, but also very sad to see any species go extinct. When you consider that the web of life is a rich thick tapestry with all the creatures woven into it, you don't want someone wantonly picking away at the threads. You want it preserved intact.

I want natural sites from the big and obvious like Yellowstone, to the local streams and woods left alone, unmolested by the bulldozer. Conventional wisdom from City Planners say that capitalism in the form of development is good. Communities around here are throwing money and tax breaks at already rich developers and investors to come and exploit what natural areas there are "Come here! Build! Build! Build! No restrictions!" I disagree. Those money men will come and make another pile of money off their wheelings and dealings, but they'll be gone tomorrow from our community and we'll be stuck with one less lake, one less grove of trees, and many displaced wild animals. Preserve what's important. The world before we came and trampled it and paved it.

This can be applied to businessmen. There are many temptations to do and say the thing that it would take to get that sale, close that deal, make that aquisition. What good does it do to to win today if there won't be a tomorrow because no one trusts you? Or, if you are really ruthless, and keep winning at the expense of others, what good does it do to sit alone in your house on a huge pile of money if no one loves, cares, or respects you?

Preserve what's important. For a soldier, this means your life. Do what you have to do, but get home. You can always sort it all out and learn to live with it, but if you're dead, there's no way to live with it.

Preserve what's important. For an individual in their career development, that means gray matter. You won't be able to take anything physical with you when or if the company you work for now lets you go or goes under, but you can take what you learned from your experience. So it's more important to learn than anything else you do in a job. It's the only thing you'll get to preserve later.

Preserve what's important. In your personal life, that means the love and respect of the people in your family. You have to do what it takes to keep the connections alive, insure that they have all the help they need to get through life, and make sure they know how important they are to you.

That's what is important.

Gone Fishin'

When I was a kid, my dad would take us fishing.

We lived near Lake Jacomo, built in the 50's, probably by damming up some prime farmland, and damning it to sit under a lake from then on.

We loved the lake, it had shelter houses and docks and rented out pontoon boats for fishing out away from the edge from time to time.

The lake has a great deal of land around it that was made into a park. There are no private houses on the lake, and speed boats or wave runners are allowed. This lake is an old fashioned, slow paced walk back in time.

Over the years, I've spent a lot of time out there. We went to picnics in the shelters in addition to fishing. As a teenager, I used to sneak around out there, trying not to get in trouble. I remember one time we were right next to the lake in the winter, and the lake was frozen. I was with 3 friends and we started throwing rocks on the lake ice. It made these weird eerie sounds like some demon playing the violin. I understand now that the thin ice was vibrating near some resonance frequency, but at the time, it was just an unexpected and unexplained delight.

Later, I discovered the "Hooved Animal Enclosure" where they keep Elk & Bison. Although you are not supposed to feed these animals, that's exactly what everyone does. They bring bags of carrots to stick through the chain link fence. There is something deliciously dangerous feeling about sticking a carrot into the mouth of an enormous bull elk with a rack of antlers that looks like it could shred you like cabbage.

There are great paths around the lake, complete with mud, mosquitos, and chiggers, but uncluttered with manmade things and empty of other people. One year, I discovered an old road that was blocked off with a single pole swing gate, and I decided to walk it. I found white and pink wild roses that had gone nuts, climbing up and into trees, sometimes 10 or 12 feet high. The road bed was cracked and full of weeds, but still had faint centerlines painted on it. It ran into the lake. This was a road left over from before the lake was made! How cool! Going back up the hill, I found myself about 8 feet away from a doe with 2 spotted fawns behind it. I froze, not wanting to scare it away. You never get to see deer up that close. The doe started bucking up on its hind legs, pawing at the air and stamping its hooves at me. Finally, the fawns darted away and the doe dropped down and followed, but not before I had time to wonder if the doe would actually attack me to protect the fawns. That same road yielded another find in the spring. Iris and peony beds made me stop and explore a spot beside the road. This must have been someone's yard at one time. Close inspection brought me to a pile of overgrown rubble with a bedspring still visible. So they must have bulldozed the house some time around the time the land was purchased and turned into a park. It was probably the house of someone that came here and homesteaded in the area after the Civil War.

More recently, I've taken to running the hilly roads around the lake in the park. There are plenty of droppings on the roads, showing that in an area where no humans can build, the creatures will thrive. There used to be a spot on one little gravel road where people would stop on their way to or from a day's fishing and a racoon would come out of the woods and beg at their carside. That was a few years back, and I don't know if that racoon taught her offspring the trade or not.

Last weekend while running around the lake, I saw a blue heron on the waterside across a narrow cove. I was running along a road at the water's edge and hoped the heron wouldn't notice me or care, but he finally decided that I was not someone he wanted to hang around and look at. He took off, with his 6 foot wingspan, flying just inches above the mirror smooth water. That was beautiful, but the sound he started making was less than mellifluous. Maybe it was a distress call, but it sounded discordant and alien. Not disturbing, just unexpected from a bird as graceful as that.

This fall, we plan on hiking some of the areas that are not accessible by roads. With all the development going on around here, having a wild park so near is a rare and precious thing.

Cropduster

I took a great vacation a few years ago with my brother Steve and my "kid sister" Rita. Rita is my ex-girlfriend's little sister, and a great travel companion.

We were in Colorado, going across the Alamosa County plains south of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument (why is a naturally occurring feature called a "Monument"? you're supposed to make a monument).

My brother pointed out a small yellow plane and said, "there's a crop duster." I looked over and saw this tiny plane with not much bulk to it. I couldn't see any nozzles on the wings, no piping, and no liquid tanks. Maybe I had a vision of a crop dusting plane from watching Petticoat Junction in my youth, but the plane he pointed out wasn't what I expected in a crop duster.

I said as much, which started somewhat of an eruption on my brother's part. He was mad that I doubted him, and expressed quite vehemently that he knew what he was talking about and this was a crop duster.

Rita and I found it quite hilarious. You've probably been there. At some point in your life, you will experience someone that is quite angry, yet very comical at the same time. Rita and I were laughing hysterically and when Steve wound down, we would start him up again with a simple, "I don't know...." or "I'm not so sure about that..." and it would start again. He was on a roll. He was in one of those times where "at a loss for words" is the furthest from the truth.

I don't think he was quite as furious as he sounded, because we were laughing and he kept on ranting. I think if we really offended him badly, he would have shut up and not said a word.

We had a great rest of the day, trying to climb the Great Sand Dunes, and then leaping down in large loping strides. I was "Sand-tor" that day. We ended up in Taos later that evening and it was really one of those days that are almost perfect.

I can't speak for Rita, but I can say that I really did not think it was a crop duster. Despite Steve's insistence, it just didn't seem right. The plane was just so tiny. I did not doubt that Steve believed it was, I just assumed he was mistaken. Of course, there was no way to prove it, so it was one of those unresolved issues that come up from time to time.

Until we were on the way home. Somewhere out around Garden City Kansas, after looking for ghost towns and climbing the Capulin volcano earlier that day, we were making the long drive back. Suddenly, I noticed that there was one of those little yellow planes that Steve had pointed out earlier and called a crop duster. "Hey, there's one of those planes" was about all I had time to say before it dropped down, leveled out, and started spraying a field. We watched it pull up, bank steeply, and turn around for its next spraying run.

I'll be damned. It was a crop duster.

You rarely get such instant and complete vindication in your life as Steve did that day. Somehow, it wasn't enough. To Rita and I, it was still fun and funny. Steve's rant was easily in the top 3 or 4 funny things I've ever heard in my life. Maybe it's just a show, but to this day, he still gets a little mad when we bring it up. And even though I don't remember much of what he said, to this day it still makes me smile and feel like laughing.

Dangerous Curve

I live on a dangerous curve.

It's a right angle with a steep bank and a downhill grade. We also learned that it is a "compound curve" meaning it has two radii, one smaller than the other. It amounts to a setup to fling unsuspecting cars off the road.

They tell people to slow down to 25 mph, but people rarely do. I've seen so many accidents around this curve over the years that I don't pay attention anymore.

One time a truck that the police were chasing crashed here. It was spike stripped, tires blown out, and lost control and ended up on its side in our neighbor's yard. The man jumped out, like someone coming out of a tank hatch, and tried to run away into the woods. He almost made it, but fell down off the bank of our pond and was caught and dragged off by the police. My brother and I got to watch out the window as we were sitting there watching TV. Sort of like America's Most Wanted in our back yard.

Another time, I was working in the garden and heard tires squealing and looked up in time to see a yellow Corvette hit a tree head on. My first reaction was that whoever was in the car would be pretty scrambled and in dire need of medical attention, so I went inside first and called an ambulance. I came up to the car and a friend in another car had stopped next to him. I told them that I had called 911, and they were in the friend's car and out of there in no time. I suspected that they were drunk, and I wondered if there was anything incriminating in the car. The police showed up at that point, and they told me later that the man was found drunk at his house.

The most interesting crasher was a big burly tattooed biker looking guy. He managed to miss all the trees by the road and go about 100 yards down a hill before he found a tree worthy of hitting. He was so drunk, he wasn't sure what was going on. They couldn't communicate with him, so they assumed that he was hurt and strapped him to a back board. When he started fighting it, they put him in restraints. He was carried to an ambulance handcuffed and strapped down and shouting obscenities at the EMTs and police.

One night, I was watching TV with my cousins and brother. The cousins were visiting from out of town and it was winter time and cold out. A couple of drunk kids came around the curve, went off the road and took out our gas meter and utility pole. The power didn't go out immediately, but the electrical transformer that was on the pole was thrown into a tree next to the pole. The gas was coming out of the busted pipe sticking up out of the ground with a loud hiss, and 20' away, the tranformer was wedged in a tree, sparking like mad. To make matters worst, the kids had flattened all of their tires and were spinning on their hubs on the gravel drive, spewing out sparks. The feared explosion never happened, but we did get to watch all the excitement for about 3 hours. By 9 am the next morning, everything but cable TV was restored.

Most recently, we had a death on the curve. We were out of town and found out about it later. A lady spun out and hit a tree right on her drivers side door. She lived through the crash and was medevaced by helicopter from a field 5 doors down. She died about a week later after lapsing into a coma.

After that, they put a guard rail up. Kinda like locking the barn door after the horse already escaped.

Impact

Jake Brown was competing in the X-Games this week and fell 50 feet to the floor after a mishap with this skateboard. He walked away from the fall. You can check out the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBvCrSjpx9I

Apparently, the only injuries he has are a minor fracture on a vertebra, a broken bone in his wrist, and some liver damage. Watch the video, that's amazingly light damage for the fall that he took.

At the same time this week, reporters were talking about how a lot of people in the Minneapolis bridge collapse fell 65 feet and not only survived, but walked away uninjured. Many of them went to the hospital 2 or 3 days later, finally complaining about their aches and pains, but still, a 65 foot fall is supposed to be fatal.

So how did these people walk away for falls that are supposed to kill you?

Jake Brown actually had time to think about it and was able to twist around to control his landing to minimize the impact. They interviewed him and he claims he thought about the fall of a friend of his while he was falling. His friend fell from a lesser height than Jake, but broke both legs. So he probably thought it through before he was in trouble. He said in an interview after the accident that he planned to fall the way he did. I heard that Army Airborne parachutists hit with the impact of someone jumping off a 2 story building. The way they are trained to survive the fall is to hit on their feet, crumple by collapsing their legs, and roll out across their side, taking up the rest of the force. I think Jake did somthing similar to this. He hit on his feet and that probably took a great deal of the impact. I still wonder why the legs didn't snap under him.

The people that were in cars on the bridge when it fell claim that there were a series of jolts rather than one long fall. Even though the bridge looks like it drops pretty fast, it wasn't freefall, it was getting hung up on the way down, slowing the fall.

Americans used to drive around without seat belts. Car accidents used to kill around 65,000 people a year in the 60s, and I believe we're down to around 40,000 a year. That's with something like twice the total miles travelled for cars, so I'm guessing we've reduced the fatality rate to 1/4 what it was. We finally decided that enough was enough back then and started developing safety features in cars, starting with the seatbelt.

The way the seatbelt works is by making you part of the car. Before seatbelts, accidents were a series of 2 collisions. Your car hit an object and then you flew forward in the car and hit the windshield or steering column. The second little mini collision between the person and the car is what injures the people inside. When you strap yourself in, you become a part of the car, and it takes the brunt of the impact.

A moving object requires energy to stop. In a collision, that energy is used to deform the car. Think of crushing a soda can with your foot. In an accident the car gets hurt, not the person. When engineers started understanding this, they started designing "crumple zones" into the car. Those are places that the car is designed to smash down safely and not smash the people inside. In most cases, this is the frame in the front, below the engine. They also reinforced the cab so that the area where the people are is less likely to crumple. Two other features they designed were a seat that supported your head and airbags to cushion your forward motion. This impact is supposed to be like being smashed between pillows.

In the case of the Minneapolis bridge collapse, the cars are falling straight down while upright. This is not the way a car is designed to impact, but it is the way a car, and the driver in the car, are designed to be supported. I suspect that many of the cars on the bridge would have flat tires (quite a cushion there, like 4 air bags)and probably snapped axles. That would take a lot of the energy out, and then the people are sitting upright in cushioned seats that would take up the rest.

That's just my theory. This is not something you ever want to really test.

Bridging the Gap

The news in Minneapolis this week was unreal. A highway bridge collapsed over the Mississippi during rush hour with vehicles going over the bridge. This tragedy is a rare event that is making many people think about bridges and wonder about how you know if they are safe.

I started doing this in college. My sophomore curriculum in Mechanical Engineering included a Statics course. This is where you learn about the forces in structures, how things want to bend, and how weights and levers affect bodies at rest. The Statics textbook authors loved to use little bridges to illustrate the principles it was teaching. I loved the little bridge designs. The ME's would go on to take this information and use it to design tools and machines. The Civil (Structural) Engineers would actually design bridges. Every freshman engineer is taught about a phenomenon called resonance with the example of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a structure that tore itself to pieces because of wind induced harmonics. You want engineers in training to be very worried about the consequences of failure.

After school I entered the Army, in their Corps of Engineers. Some of the things we were supposed to know was how to inspect and rate existing bridges, how to design and construct bridges, and how to destroy them. Can you guess why we needed to know this? Army Engineers are there to make sure that the rest of the forces can get where they need to get and that the bad guys can't. A river is called a "water obstacle" and the thinking is to either erect that line as an obstacle for the enemies movement and at the same time, to breach that line to facilitate your own movement. So we learn about the breach points, the bridges.

Demolitions of bridges was a fascinating study. You learn that it is surprisingly hard to knock most bridges down. The trick is to find the weak key point and blast away at it, hoping it would take down the rest of the bridge. There are examples of people that drop a center span of a bridge, but not the approaches, so you could easily rebuild the gap and restore the bridge. There are lots of examples of artillery cutting the wires out to the charges and the demolition failing, or charges badly placed that did nothing. Most bridges have a lot of redundancy built into them. Another note about bridge failure, again involving resonance. We were taught that when large formations of soldiers cross bridges, you go to "route step", which is a marching term meaning you break step, or stop having everyone slam their foot down at the exact same time. Supposedly, the combined force of all those footfalls happening simultaneously is enough to sometimes collapse a bridge.

We also had to inspect bridges and rate their load carrying capability and their integrity. This was surprisingly hard to do, because most of the bridges I looked at were made of wood, and most of the guide was about steel bridges. We had to make sure that bridges could handle heavy construction equipment, and most of the guides rated bridges in terms of main battle tanks. I guess a bulldozer is pretty close. This process of inspecting bridges always bothered me. We learned in materials that steel fails by a mechanism called cyclic fatigue. This is like when you bend a metal hanger enough times and eventually it breaks. You can't see cyclic fatigue, usually. The other mechanism that occurs is stress fracture propagation. Many people believe that tiny cracks on the surface of the metal eventually propagate into the center of the structure and widen, weakening the metal. The problem is that you don't know to what degree metal has weakened, and it's not often evident from a visual inspection. You could see these fractures and indications of fatigue with x-rays, but you can't x-ray a whole bridge. So often, we'd inspect and rate a bridge and I would wonder if we missed something or if our estimate was even in the ball park. One time, I was driving with 2 surveyors in the back country in Panama and we came to a tiny sagging suspension bridge in the country. I didn't think we would ever be able to put a pickup truck across it without breaking the bridge. I barely trusted it for foot traffic. The driver insisted, and as I got out and watched from the safety of the road, he slowly drove over the bridge. Stopping in the middle, he looked up and made eye contact with me, smiling, and started bouncing up and down in his seat. It was very funny. He made it across, but I still wonder how that nasty little bridge held him. Another bridge I remember was an ancient suspension bridge 100' over a river in Ecuador. The wooden floor of the bridge was very old and crumbling and several boards were missing. The first time I went over it, my knees were shaking so bad, I could barely walk. After watching a man drive a herd of cattle over the bridge one day, I stopped worrying about it as much. Later, I always stopped in the middle and got the bridge swaying, because by then it was like a fun amusement park ride.

By far, the most fun was building bridges. At school, they always get students to make a span with popsicle sticks or toothpicks, then add weight until it failed. Calvin and Hobbes had a great cartoon where the father explains to Calvin that the way they made highway bridges in a similar way, overloading and breaking it first and then rebuilding it. The Army uses a bridge called the Bailey bridge, which is the tinker toy method of constructing bridges. You use these truss panel sections, and just stack them up differently for different lengths and weight classes. It was in a manual like a book of recipes for bridges. I got to work on building two of them and also found a few already in place that had been in service for years.

When I got to Panama, I got to see one of the coolest bridges in the world, the Bridge of the Americas. This structure, shown in the picture above, spans the mouth of the Panama canal. It is beautiful, but has a strange feature. There are 4 lanes on the bridge. You go up to and over the bridge on two lanes, then it necks down to one lane. So there's only 3 lanes on the approaches (the ones that are still on the bridge, just not the central span). It's harrowing during rush hour traffic, because you rush across the bridge, speeding for placement at the other end, and then you merge dangerously before the lanes come together, honking your horn the whole time. That was the way you drove in Panama. I crossed the bridge every day to go to work.

Sharon, one of my coworkers, read that people's fear of crossing bridges is second only to public speaking of the biggest fears there are. This week's collapse in Minneapolis is probably not going to help that.

First Car

This is close to what my first car looked like. Somehow, this doesn't look quite right. OK, I remember. Mine was a 4 door hatchback. The grill may have been a little different, too

It was a Chevy Chevette, I think from 1980. My dad bought it for me when I went to college. I remember that I didn't get it until after the 2nd or 3rd week I was up at school. I'm not sure how I got around campus before that.

I loved that car in some ways, hated it in others. It was a cheap car, not cool or sporty or racy. I think Dad paid about $2,500 for it. He bought it used. It had no FM radio, no AC, and no power steering. It really needed floor vents on the summer, the area around your feet would get really hot. On the plus side, it was light (easy to push), easy to fix, got good gas mileage, and it didn't cost me anything. You could fit a lot of cargo in it, surprisingly, in the deceptive spacious hatchback. An unexpected bonus was that it was pretty good off-road. It's short wheel base meant that it had pretty good clearance. I took it on some really rocky and rutted country & farm roads while I was in college.

I had a battery problem for most of one year, so I parked it on hills and roll started it. It was fun learning that trick. I would start the car by getting it up to speed and popping the clutch. I had to replace that clutch cable once, it was a $29 part and I put it on myself. The shocks were shot for the last year or two I had it. The piston on the hatch failed at some point and I used a vice grip on the piston rod to hold it up.

One time, I drove it with a friend up to Bluemont Hill in Manhattan Kansas, and it slid sideways on the rough road and put a foot long dent in the driver's door. I got out, inspected the damage, and smacked it with the heels of my hands at either end of the crease. The metal popped back into shape like it had never been dented.

When school was winding down, I figured that I was going out into the world and going to be getting paid and that I would get a serious car. So I bought my first Jeep, which turned out to be a lemon (until I replaced a lot of parts on it). I took that fuel injected new Jeep overseas to Panama when I was in the Army. They only had leaded fuel down there, which fouled and plugged the Jeep's fuel injectors. I realized that if I had just kept the cheap little Chevette, I would have been better off.

It was my college car, so in some ways it holds a lot of special memories. I think my dad's attitude was that a teenager doesn't need, deserve, or appreciate an expensive vehicle and it's crazy to go into debt just to get them a fancy car. I think he was right about that. It was a measure of comfort to know that if I did screw up my car, it would not cost a lot to fix or replace. But I took really good care of it and it took me anywhere I wanted to go in return.

The summer after basic training (for ROTC officers, it was called Summer Camp), I loaded up the Chevette and took it to Colorado with my 12 or 13 year old little brother. I had taught him how to drive, possibly before that time, and I believe he kept asking if he could drive (this may have been the next summer). He was so excited to be going on this trip that he babbled the whole way out to Colorado and was driving me crazy. At one point, I stuck my head out of the window and yelled at the top of my lungs. It was funny. Overall, we had a great time.

I wonder how long the old car lasted before it finally died? Knowing my old cars, it's probably still out there, still going. At least it is in my memories.