Puente de La Paz II part 2

Continuing with the story of my Costa Rican deployment. If you haven't read the previous posts, this is the 4th in a series of recollections of my time in the Army when I was stationed in Panama from 1987 to 1990. Our Unit, the 536th Engineer Battalion, deployed all over Central and South America doing engineering missions called Nation Building. We built roads and bridges, schools and churches, and dug water wells with our engineering assets.

We always had National Guard troops attached to us, part of their annual 2 week rotations. Mostly these were a hodgepodge of Engineering units, such as the Georgia National Guard that I distinctly remember being in this deployment. Their thick accents and non-stop horseshoes tournaments marked the territory they inhabited. You always knew when the good old boys from Georgia were tossing shoes because there was a constant ringing sound as they racked up the points. Besides engineering units, we always had medical, dental, and veterinarian units attached.

The medical assets were part of the "winning the hearts and minds" strategy. You have to remember, this was at the tail end of the Cold War and we were in a constant battle to exert a stronger influence on the impoverished people of Latin America. With Nicaragua as a recent example, we knew that poverty and a lack of help or hope were making the entire region ripe for revolution. So we had a Gate Clinic, where anyone could come and see a doctor for free. Each day when the clinic opened, a long line formed. One day, a small child was brought to the gate in dire condition. He was immediately medevaced to Limon, the nearest hospital, where he died. His guts were completely overwhelmed with a parasite.

Our Batallion Commander decided that part of our education as officers would be to go out and see the remote clinics, so one day we flew over to a small town that a medic, a veterinarian, and a dental tech were sent to. The vet showed us a donkey with worms and talked about how foul their water supply was. Then we were ushered into the dentist's office. They brought a dentist chair and a bag of tools, and that's it. We stood to the side and watched silently as a native woman came in, sat down, and opened her mouth. The dental tech talked cheerfully to us as he leaned in with a pair of dentist's pliers and quickly yanked out three of her teeth. He smiled and turned around to show us the bloody tooth in his pliers. Someone asked how he could do this without anesthesia or even any painkillers or deadeners. He replied, "These people are tough." They walked around with rotten teeth for a long time, then felt nothing but relief when they were pulled. The guy remarked further that while Americans would sit on a couch with a bottle of painkillers for a few days, these people would be out working in their fields by the end of the day.

I walked the road route one day, and found a large tree next to a little soccer field in the middle of the route, nowhere near any roads. The route had been marked by LT Condon, an older Lietenant that took himself way too seriously. The large tree had a colony of Crested Oropendolas. These beautiful birds made teardrop shaped nests that hung under the branch and sang with a flutelike melody. There were hundreds of them in this enormous tree, and it was marked for removal by LT Condon. I decided this was stupid and removed the mark, putting it a good 50' away so the road would go around the tree.

I walked on to a spot where they were building a small culvert style creek crossing. SFC Malloy was at the controls of a big trackhoe, doing the excavation. He wasn't normally supposed to work equipment. Older NCOs were supposed to train and supervise the younger soldiers who were supposed to do the actualy work. We did not have a trackhoe in our TOE (Table of Organization and Equipment - our equipment did not include this). We rented the trackhoe and maybe no one was familiar with it, or maybe he just wanted to play. I watched him move this enormous excavator right up to the pit, expertly and quickly scoop out the hole, and lower culvert pieces into place. They said that good equipment operators could push a dime around on the ground with a grater, and seeing the skill he had with the trackhoe, I could believe it. As I talked with SFC Malloy afterwards, I told him about the colony tree and what I did, hoping that he would back me up as the man in charge on the ground when they reached that spot. "Fuck LT Condon" was his comment on the situation. He never planned on knocking the tree down. "Too much work. Easier to go around. If he can get the Colonel to tell me to do it, I'll tell him the same thing. We haven't got time to waste on such foolishness."

My tentmates were all the junior officers in the 15th Engineer Company. They were mostly Lieutenants, but there was one CW4, Chief Young. Chief Young was almost 60. He had served a full career in the British Army and then started from scratch again in the U.S. Army. He was grumpy and hilarious. Each night he "played cards" with the CO (there may have been rum involved) and then would stumble in long after the lights were out in the tent and go to bed, making hilarious comments in a thick British accent. One night, we caught one of the enormous Rhinocerous Beetles that you found everywhere in the camp. These things were the size of half a tennis ball, with a huge horn like a rhinocerous out the front of their face. They could fly, but you mostly noticed them crawling. We caught one that day and tied a string to it's horn and tethered it to the empty cot next to Chief Young's cot. He stumbled in as usual and fell into his cot, settling in. Soon, the beetle started to strain as the end of his tether, making a horrid scratching sound on the tight cot fabric. "BLOODY HELL! WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?" Chief Young yelled, startling the beetle and setting it into flight at the end of it's tether. Imagine a bumblebee the size of a rabbit and you'll get the idea of what it sounded like. "GET IT OUT GET IT OUT GET IT OUT!" He started shouting. We were all awake and laughing like hell as we moved to release the poor beetle. Chief was sour about that incident for a week.

My other tentmates included LT Damore, who was an enthusiastic runner and the only one in the whole camp that I was aware of that kept up his PT (Physical Training) while on the deployment. The only problem with this is that he had only one jogging outfit and hung it out to dry on the tent cords next to his cot each day. As we did not have easy access to laundry, you can imagine how this smelled after only a few days. It was a constant source of tension. The lower enlisted tent next to us had a guy with a boom box that played "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" by U2 every morning. It became our theme song. LT Wilson, who worked the bulldozers that were tearing into the leading edge of the road, became the focus of an interesting daily ritual. The first day they reached the 4 to 5 story tall trees they had to knock down, they got a surprise. The bulldozer ran into the first tree, and as the operator reached down to put it in reverse, the rain of snakes that were dislodged from the tree hit the bulldozer. Imagine an operator running like hell as dozens of already freaked out snakes slithered like mad after contacting the hot engine cover of the bulldozer. It was quite unnerving, so they worked out a procedure. The first tree strike was followed by people moving in with long forked sticks and flicking all the snakes out of the way. A piece of plywood was set over the operator's open cage so he wouldn't have to pick one out of the back of his shirt. LT Wilson wanted to know which and how many of the snakes were poisonous, so he would cut their heads off and bring them back to the tent each evening. What I remember is that all of the snakes were poisonous.

We had a lot of equipment problems. A couple of times we had bulldozers get bogged down stuck in the mud. One time there was a spring-fed bog that a bulldozer went into and got mired up to a point over it's tracks. It was stuck so badly that we had to get two other bulldozers attach their winches and pull together to get it out. The danger in pushing the winches to their limits was that the cables could snap. Apparently, a snapped cable of this size under this much load would could cut a man in half faster than a hot knife through butter. We did not get to test this theory. We did however, manage to roll a scraper (you may have seen these vehicles, whose pans were big enough to put a pickup truck in) as well as break the fuel truck, and a dump truck.

The dump truck rolled backwards, went off the road, and then rolled side over side down a hill. The guy inside was not buckled in, as we had no seat belts in the dump trucks. I was about 300 yards away and ran over when I heard about it. Another driver ran to the dump truck and pulled the driver out just as the spilled diesel coming out of the fuel tank started to catch on fire. I was in the ambulance with the soldier before he was medevaced out. His leg was broken and he knew he was going to be taken straight from the accident out of the country. He told another soldier to get his things taken care of, "You know what I'm talking about, right?" I'm pretty sure he was asking the other guy to hide his stash, but I didn't worry about it. His pants were cut where they hit something sharp in the dump truck. I asked the medic what the white jelly on his pants leg was, and he explained that this was body fat that squirted out when his leg split open under impact.

In the end, my work as the Platoon leader of Equipment Support Platoon wasn't the only thing I did in the deployment. I also was tagged to be in charge of the "trail party" which were the people that drove all the equipment to the port and loaded it onto the ship. Aside from someone driving one of the wreckers into the ocean and a soldier stealing his buddy's pay, it was pretty uneventful.

Puente de La Paz II part 1

Here's story 3 in the continuing saga of my Panamanian experience. I'm skipping over a portion of the story, fast forwarding to the next deployment.

We had a mission to go to Costa Rica and help develop a region on the northern, or Caribbean coast. We were going to build roads and bridges, among other things. They had to have fancy Spanish names for the deployments, and they had gone to Costa Rica the previous year and called it Puente de la Paz (Bridge of Peace) and so they reached back deep in their imagination and called this one Puente de la Paz II.

We loaded all our equipment up in a ship and it went through the Panama Canal to the port of Limon, Costa Rica. There it was unloaded by the "advance party" whose job it was to move it from the port to the base camp, about 3 hours away. The fun began immediately. One of my "Concrete Mobiles" which is a fancy concrete truck, went off the road and rolled over. The rainy season was supposed to have finished before we deployed, but it had one last series of rainstorms that flooded the area. Our initial deployment became a disaster relief effort. We deployed with lots of helicopters and began by using them to rescue people that were stranded by the rising flood waters.

We came into Limon, the nearest big city, about an hour's drive away, north and west of our camp, a port city on the coast. You drove down the coast until you got to an area of beautiful black sand beaches. This is an area that a lot of Americans, hippies from the 60s mostly, came down here to settle. We turned inland and went through a banana plantation. This used to be a Dole banana plantation, but I don't think Dole owned it anymore by the time we got there. It took 10 to 15 minutes to fly over the plantation and about 30 or 40 minutes to drive through it. This place was huge. It had little cities with schools and soccer fields sprinkled throughout it. There was a series of overhead rails through the plantation, with swing bridges across the roads. People would walk out, pick big bunches of bananas, and hook them up on an upside down tree of hooks, that were supported by a big pulley at top. They pulled the big bunch of bunches along the overhead rails to central processing systems where the bunches were boxed and loaded on rail cars that shipped to the coast and loaded on boats. Bananas on a massive scale.

One day, I was taking a helicopter ride with about 12 to 15 other guys, and the pilot wanted to practice "nap of the earth" flying maneuvers. The aviation guys were attached to us in order to get training time anyway, so how they flew from point a to point b didn't matter as long as they got us there. Nap of the Earth flying was a combat maneuver where a helicopter can sneak up on an enemy and avoid surface to air missiles by flying fast and low and hugging the terrain. It's exhilarating. In this flight, we skirted the banana plantation and went to the coast. The pilot then used the beach line as a guide, trying to mirror the coastline at about 30' in the air (it was probably actually 60' or 80', but it felt like we would get our feet wet). I was on the right side of the helicopter, facing the ocean. When a helicopter turns, it tilts to the side. When you do extreme maneuvers, if you are sitting on the side you are looking up and down. So my flight was surf-sky, surf, sky-surf-sky, surf.... As we buzzed along at about 40 or 50 mph, we passed by a nudist beach. Of course, listening to the chatter on the radio did no good. I missed seeing the fly-by all the naked people.

Our base camp had some serious luxuries, we thought. It was right next to a river, and it was a small city. We had a water purification plant, showers, a store, sidewalks, and a "restaurant" (we called it the Mess Hall). We had some fairly nice latrines and something I had never seen before called "piss tubes". Imagine an 8" PVC pipe stuck into a pit full of gravel, surrounded by a chest high screen of white cloth. You stand there, taking a leak, and you can see everyone walking all around you. From a guy's standpoint, this is fantastic. I still remember watching SSG Gates one morning, with an apple in his mouth while he used the facilities. It was hilarious. I had a little Filipino Sergeant named SGT Corpuz that was about 5' 4" or so, and smart as a whip. They guy could do whatever he wanted with a large piece of equipment and did not lack in courage or initiative. He had this Filipino accent and a sarcastic and funny streak, so occasionally I would get an ear full of why everything was completely FU, and even though the news was bad, by then end of the story, I'd be laughing my ass off.

Our Company Commander was a Puerto Rican called CPT Font. The guy really did not belong in the Army, and certainly not in the Engineers. He didn't know what he was doing, and his idea of leadership was yelling louder. He had all these euphemisms, which, when translated literally to English made no sense whatsoever. I remember him saying something like "You gots to reach down, and grab your balls for this one." On March 15th, 1988, I was in a staff meeting on this deployment. We went around the table and everyone got to have their say. When my turn came, I said "Beware the Ides of March." The other Lieutenants and Chief laughed, just a little. CPT Font held me after the meeting and was just furious with me. I think he thought I was being disrespectful and making some kind veiled insult to him. I kept saying "It's from Shakespeare, it's the 15th of March." This didn't mean anything to him, and I couldn't figure out how to explain it. Had he really not ever heard that phrase before?

I remember my first trip over to the field Motor Pool, some half mile away, I saw a Coral Snake in the road. You can't miss something like that. I remembered the information on him, deadly venomous, but with chewing teeth, not piercing fangs. If you let him get a hold of you, he'd try to get between the webbing of your fingers and chew some poison into your skin. Over the course of the mission, we became very familiar with snakes.

The motor pool had a tiny road going out the back of it down to a nice stream. The soldiers would drive their vehicles into the stream and scrub all the mud off in it. We had a 20 ton crane in the platoon that was the biggest thing in the company. One day it rained really hard and we told everyone to stay in the motor pool and do maintenance on their vehicles. We had a guy named Greenwald that was one of the crane operators, and he decided to take the crane down to the river and wash it. He claimed that he thought that the river crossing was in the motor pool and all we told him to do was to stay in the motor pool. The reason for the restriction to the motor pool was that the rain had made the roads like axle grease -too slippery to drive on. After our concrete truck slid off the road on the way from the port to the base camp, I assumed that everyone knew the hazards of the wet clay. We were "grounded" because it was too dangerous to move any equipment anywhere. The 20 ton crane was cool. It had normal driving mode, and "crab" mode, and "circle" mode. Crab was when all wheels turned the same way and the crane would move sideways. Circle was when all the wheels turned to make the crane go in a tight circle. When Greenwald took the massive crane down the grease-slick tiny steep road, he didn't take long to lose control. As the crane started to slide, in a panic, Greenwald slapped the crane into Crab and it went straight for the side of the road, for the big drop-off down the side of the hill. The crane did indeed roll sideways down the hill, and the little glass operator's cab was crushed flat. For some reason, in the investigation afterwards, Greenwald insisted that he was inside of the cab. He insisted that he did not "abandon ship", but stayed with the crane in a valiant attempt to recover it from the slide. It was obvious this was not the case, and was not even possible. Anyone that had stayed in that cab would be a human pancake. The fact that he disobeyed orders and did something incredibly stupid weren't what Greenwald was embarrassed about, it was the thought that he was a chicken and jumped out of the cab before the crane rolled over that he could not confess. And that was the only smart thing he did that day.

Arrival in Panama part two of two

I left off in my previous post at the point that I was on a deployment in Chirique Province. I talked about the helicopter rides, but I did not talk about the countryside rides. I worked with Smith and Woldridge (Woolridge? I can't remember for sure). Smith was red headed and funny in a confident country boy kind of way. Woolridge was funny in a Christian Slater kind of way (and he looked a lot like him).

We had to drive down these little crappy roads to get to our sites. On one road was a stream that had banks that dropped down about 10'. The stream wasn't too far across, maybe 12' or 15'. There was a cut in the bank and a water crossing, or you could take the bridge. This was not a bridge that for one minute I considered taking. It was a suspension bridge, with the support towers visibly leaning into the center. I was for going through the stream. Smith was driving and didn't want to go through the stream because then he would have to wash the blazer. This funny exchange went on, with Smith telling me we should do it and me telling him he was nuts. Finally, Woolridge and I got out of the Blazer and stood on the bank while he went across. I must have gone over the bridge first on foot, because I remember watching Smith's face as he went over. Smith went very slowly over the bridge, and I watched, expecting the whole thing to come crashing down. I think Smith knew that's what I was thinking because he was driving with his neck craned up, looking over the side until he got in the middle, where he stopped and his eyes went wide. I had just enough time to wonder what was wrong when he started bouncing up and down in his seat. I'm sure I did a frantic "Don't do that, you crazy person!" look or gesture, because he was laughing his ass off shortly. I can't believe the truck made it over that crappy little bridge.

There was a stretch of road we were making that was getting the most attention. We could not find a good local natural supply of rock, much less crushed rock to make the roadbed with. While we searched, construction on the road continued and we worked around the frequent heavy rains in the area. We knew that if you graded everything smooth at the end of the day and ran the vibratory roller over the road last, that the smooth hard dirt surface would drain off the rain and dry out in about an hour. The road was so smooth and slick that kids were going down it in skateboards. I never questioned what a kid in the jungle with no paved surfaces in site was doing with a skateboard.

The road went through a coffee plantation, and the coffee was harvested by hand and spread out on tarps or small slabs to dry in the sun. It was swept up and put into bags, and these little old ladies would sling great big sacks of coffee beans over their backs and walk for miles to the processing buildings.

The leader of the platoon working on the road was Lieutenant Gonzales, a Puerto Rican officer with little engineering abilities or experience. He did speak spanish fluently, though, so he could sure talk to the locals. Lt. Gonzles started to wear these big sunglasses one day, and I could see he was trying to cover up a black eye. I spoke to Sergeant (SFC) Parks, his Platoon Sergeant, but he would not tell me what was going on. SFC Parks was a wizard with equipment, a really good yet friendly Platoon Sergeant with a ready smile and a southern accent. I found out that Lt. Gonzales had tried to take advantage of a local girl, and SFC Parks had caught him in the act before he could do anything to the girl. SFC Parks had torn Lt. Gonzales off of the girl and beat the hell out of him. Now you have to understand that in the military it is very much against the rules to strike a superior officer. The penalty for that would have been very severe. Lt. Gonzales couldn't turn him in without people discovering what he was doing when he got caught, and SFC Parks wasn't going to say anything about it either. It was one of those rare cases when justice was served.

The other main thing I remember about the deployment, besides the cheery red and white color that they painted all the little schools in the area was the fruits. There was fruit trees everywhere with these lemon looking fruits in them. They called them limones (lee'-moan-ays), but they were really limes. You could make a really nice drink with them if you squeezed them and cut them with water, but they were way too tart to drink. There was something funky about the oranges, too, and you could not eat them either.

I didn't make any lifelong friends or accomplish anything noteworthy on the deployment, but I did enjoy myself and learn a lot.

When the deployment finished, I had to go back to Panama and get a house and meet my wife coming down from the states. But that is another story.

Arrival in Panama part one of two

I went to college on an Army ROTC scholarship. They paid my out of state tuition in exchange for 4 years in the Army when I got done.

I graduated after 5 years with 156 credit hours (ROTC electives did not count toward my BS degree, so it added up to an extra 28 credit hours above what I needed for my degree).

After a 4 month stint in Washington DC at Ft. Belvoir, I shipped out to Panama. The flight was memorable, because although it was long, it was over the Carribean, which had the most beautiful blue water you'll ever see.

I stepped off the plane in Panama into a very moist and unbelievably hot climate. I remember getting a brief ride from the airfield to the guest house, where I would inprocess from for the next few days. I arrived on December 27th, 1986. I only got a brief look at the city, and the guest house was in the middle of Ft. Clayton, where all I had access to was a remote part of the post, and nothing local or native. After a couple of boring days of filling out paperwork, I finally had a Lieutenant pick me up and take me to his apartment. This was a guy that had arrived a month earlier and had gotten an apartment downtown with 2 other lieutenants, one that had been there a month, and another (one or two) that had been there just a little bit longer.

They had an apartment in a heavily urban area, on the second floor of a streecorner building with a paneria (bakery) below. I was brought to the apartment, and then the inhabitants quickly left the city for New Year's Eve celebrations on some remote beach. I did not have a key, so my nervous forays into the neighborhood were accomplished by putting a block in the door, and hoping that the apartment would not be broken into. Fear of this possibility kept me out for only 10 or 15 minutes at a time. I was amazed that the storefronts of this sweltering tropical city were decorated with fake snow, snowmen, and a Santa Clause in a thick red coat. I don't know what I expected, but in a land where most people barely knew what snow was, and almost none had ever seen it, I figured the Christmas fairy tale would be different.

At some point, I finished reading all the books and magazines I had brought and I started getting very bored. New Year's Eve was a nerve racking experience, as there were fireworks all night long, and some were firecrackers thrown from down on the street level onto the balcony of the apartment I was in. I don't know if I slept at all that night.

Finally, the long weekend was over the other Lieutenants came back. I'm not sure why they did not take me with them, but in my memory, this was the start of the hazing of the newest Lieutenant that I had to endure for around 11 months before the next new Lieutenant arrived. It sucked, and I don't count many of those guys as my friends, to this day. I ended up hanging out with an older Lieutenant Turner, Mike was his first name, and his wife was Staci. They had gone to Berkley and were definitely liberal minded, probably you could say hippies, except Mike was in the military - a strange contradiction. Staci was a very happy, very smart, very non-conventional thinker. If she thought something was bullshit, she pretty much piped up and declared it for anyone to dispute, if they cared to challenge her. I never did, because she rarely said anything that was untrue, just shockingly candid. In the military, you learn that you are working within a caste system, you are relatively powerless, and you can get into a lot more trouble for simple things than you can in the civilian world. So you learn to shut the hell up when you see something that either doesn't make sense, or makes perfect sense because it is stupid. The military way of doing things does not allow for human thought or emotion, only strict adherence to the rules, no matter how obscure or retarded.

The first thing they did was send me out into the field. I was married, and I was supposed to find a house off post - on the local economy, as they said. There used to be plenty of base housing for all the troops, but this had been turned over to the Panamanians in what we continually discovered was this long inevitable course toward turning over the whole Canal Zone to the locals as well as all the bases and abandoning the country in 1999. So you had to get an apartment, and for this, you were given $1000 a month in a housing allowance calculated for the overseas area you were in. But I was not allowed to do this normal procedure, I was shipped to an area of Panama called the Chirique province.

This deployment was called Camino de la Paz (Road of Peace) and was in a coffey growing region of low mountains on the boarder of Costa Rica. The projects consisted of roadbuilding, school construction, and well digging. I was put into a vacant slot in the S3 (Operations), where they sent me out to inspect the projects. I was given two surveyors, Smith and Woldridge.

The fun never ended. For whatever reason, I was housed with the aviation officers. These deployments always had lots of helicopters attached, and they were our air taxis, as they were just there to get air time, and shuttling us around was a good way to get it. We had mostly Hueys, but a couple of Blackhawks. The pilots were all very young, mostly CW2s, which was technically below me in rank, but in this region outside of normal military protocol where I couldn't really order them around if I had wanted to. They drilled all night under the watchful eye of their senior warrant officer, who continually asked them things like "If the relative humidity is high, do you get more or less lift?" as well as the more interesting questions involving how to crash land the helicopter if you ran out of power. I did not learn how to fly a helicopter by listening in to the nighttime training, but I did manage to wrangle a lot of extra flight time by being ready and able to hop random flights when I had nothing better to do.

One day, we went out to this site, and were trying to return when a thick cloud bank rolled in. We were in the air already, and the clouds were up high, at the peaks and ridges of the mountain range we were in. Unfortunately, we were about 40 minutes out from base camp, and already in the air when the clouds boxed us into this long valley. The base camp was in a field that was at the end of the next valley over. The valley we were in just kept us to the east of the base camp with no way to cross over without going over a mountain ridge.

The problem was that we couldn't see the top of the ridge, it was in thick clouds. We were in our own little triangular space defined by the cloud cover and the canyon walls. While cruising south down the valley, we searched for a low point in the ridge to our west that we could go through. You couldn't just plow through the clouds. Although there was no mechanical constraint from doing this, there was a huge safety concern. When you can't see the ground, you're likely to smack into the side of a mountain. While the copilot on the right was looking for a way out by scanning the horizon and reading a map, the pilot on the left was also looking for a way out of the valley. That's when the high tension power lines suddenly appeared in our front. We were on a direct collision course with the wires, and the pilot and co-pilot spotted them at the same time, about 40' in front of us, with us cruising along at about 30 or 40 mph. The first time I saw the wires, was when I was reacting to the sudden drop in the helicopter and watching my weightless legs kick in the air in front of me as I was thrust against my harness.

The wires were not on the map, a fact that was already being woven into that evening's lessons learned review by the pilots. I think the lesson's title was going to be, "Don't trust the damn outdated maps".

We saw a tiny clear triangle at the back of a small valley coming into the main valley to our right. The pilot turned up the valley, and measured the small opening against the helicopter, and found it to fit with a little bit of room to spare. The question was, does this valley end in a ridge/saddle line, or does it go up higher into the clouds just out of sight from the opening we could see. We had to know before we could commit ourselves. So the copilot's job was to look through the hole to see if it was clear, and the pilot's job was to pick the last possible point that he could ascend to before he would have to wheel around in the branch valley and head back down to the main valley.

You see, Huey's like ours could not just hover, we had to maintain some forward momentum in order to manuever and keep aloft. It was sort of like a frisbee, the spinning surface of the rotor blades acted like a big wing that gave us lift. Without the forward motion, you could still control the craft, and sometimes you could maintain some altitude, but usually, you would slowly descend under the weight of the craft.

We took our first run at the gap, trading speed for altitude until we hit the point of no return. At the last possible moment, the co-pilot shouted that he could see the other side and we were clear to go through, but the pilot had already used all his forward momentum and was already executing the abort maneuver when the co-pilot figured all that out.

The helicopter turned on its side and cut close to the valley walls as it dropped and gained speed back into the center of the big valley. We turned on our side again, lined up the saddle, and gunned it up the valley, pointed at the little helicopter sized opening in the end. We shot through the opening with our rotors touching the bottom of the cloud and dropped down into the new valley below, gaining speed and losing altitude. The rest of the flight was uneventful, and I felt as if I had just enjoyed an exciting roller coaster ride.

Only later did I discover that this was a pretty desperate and unique flight maneuver they had put me through. I was the only passenger, and they begged me not to tell their leader what we did. Which I was more than happy to do.

To be continued....

Calm, Cool, and Collected

When I was in the Army, I was a young 2nd Lieutenant stationed in Panama. I got a platoon after a while and got a Platoon Sergeant a while after that that I really liked. Sergeant Gates. He seemed young. He was an E6, which is a Staff Sergeant, rather than an E7, which most Platoon Sergeants were. He was smart (although he was so cool that you wouldn't think he was brilliant when you first met him). I had just had an E8 Platoon Sergeant for a very short time, Sergeant Messer, who was a lying really stupid arrogant bullying piece of shit. I still remember the only time I almost cried was when I was getting my ass reamed by Captain Toombes over an issue where an official report I had submitted was in error because my piece of shit Platoon Sergeant, Sergeant Messer, had lied to me. I was in a horrible conflict, because on one hand, it was against my style to rat out someone, I simply wanted to go and confront him myself. On the other hand, I was being asked specifically by the Captain about this issue, and I found that I could not tell him the truth. I remember telling Messer later that he lied to me and made me look bad, and I remember it was the only time I ever saw him with any humility. I finally shamed him, because he realized that I knew he was a lying sack of shit, and the only thing I wanted from him was for him to move on so I could forget about him and try to erase the damage he had done to the platoon.

Gates came in after that. Actually, there was a short stint with another Platoon Sergeant, a black quarryman named Sergeant Farmer. I can remember his face, he had been in a horrible accident at some point and his head was dented above his left temple. He was not very bright about a lot of things, like speaking clearly and spelling and writing, but he was a really nice guy, kind to the troops and very good with equipment. Then Gates came in. This was the best thing that happened to me in Panama, having a Platoon Sergeant that knew what to do with the platoon and knew how to play the Army Game. He was married to a Panamanian woman, had two enormous and very scary Rottweilers, and had a tattooed biker past, probably complete with lots of drugs and alcohol. He was funny. He also treated me with a combination of respect and friendship that I appreciated, partly because it was good and right, and partly because it was the first subordinate I had that I both liked and trusted.

Things were always chaotic, confused, and harried back then. I would get rattled, trying to do what was right when the odds against being able to get anything done, much less everything done, much less correctly, approached certainty. When I would get bent out of shape, he used to say, "Don't panic, sir." It was said with a great deal of humor, and although I would not say I was panicking, more like stressing, obsessing, or fretting, the phrase never ceased to make me stop what I was doing and laugh. It was like this perfect antidote to the daily disease that was life in the Army in Panama just prior to Noreiga's downfall and the American invasion.

That's a long lead in to the real story I wanted to tell, but I haven't thought about Sergeant Gates for a long time, and it is fun to recall what a great guy he was.

The real story is about panic. I was listening to an "All in the Mind" radio Australia podcast (rebroadcast) about panic disorders the other day. The gist of the program was looking into panic attacks and panic disorders and the drugs that are thrown at them today. The main person being interviewed was a psychologist that had personally had panic attacks herself and been prescribed Xanex. She actually participated in a clinical trial for the drug and tampered with the results. That part of the interview was a little weird, but mainly the story focused on people prone to panic attacks. Apparently, it feels like you are about to die, and it's a lot more serious than just some person being a drama queen.

I can't relate to that, just like I can't relate to manic depressive disorder. I'm not saying I'm not sympathetic, I'm just saying I haven't personally experienced that particular malady, so I don't know what it's like. Just like I can't relate to childbirth - and never will.

I'm always calm, cool, and collected. I never panic.

OK, that's not true. It's one of those things that you want to believe about yourself, but if you really had to be honest with yourself, you'd have to admit the truth. In this case, I recognize that we as a society value those that can maintain a calm, even in a crisis. I wouldn't say that I panic so much as the fact that I get very irritated, almost bent out of shape. When things aren't right, particularly when things aren't fair, it really bothers me. When bothered, I sometimes expend a lot of energy trying to get things back on track, and/or ranting about what a bunch of shit the screwed up situation is. When in Panama, everything was screwed up all the time. You spent most of the day being somewhere between pissed off and furious about how fouled up things were. What we developed after a while was an attitude of humor about all the crap that was happening. You learned to laugh at everything, because everything sucked.

My brother recently was telling a story about how his boys were complaining about how things were not fair. His response was, "Life isn't fair. Get used to it." Alternately, the soldiers in Iraq come up with slang to describe what a bunch of crap a particular situation is. They've got this great expression: "Embrace the suck": Translation: The situation is bad, but deal with it. These phrases can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7458809 if you are interested.

I was describing the program on panic disorders to my wife, and I started thinking about synonyms and antonyms of panic. This was a useful exercise in thinking about how this flavor or mood infects everyday society. Panic is a form of stress or distress. Panic has a flavor of being completely irrational. Anger isn't the same thing. When soldiers panic in combat, they may retreat or surrender, and it leads to a rout. The opposite of panic would be serenity. If you are calm, cool, and collected, you are as far from panicked as you can get. So what is the secret to serenity. I guess there is this happy balance where you are taking care of business, so you are engaged and concerned, but it's not bothering you. Is this the zen state we are looking for? I know that we tend to think of people like this as cool characters, not just that they keep their cool, but that they are cool.

I guess it doesn't matter if you're happy with what you are doing in life, and you're not driving the people around you crazy.

That's cool with me.

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.