If American nurses are our “Angels of Mercy” — and they are, believe me; especially military nurses — then our candy-striped teenage hospital volunteers must be the cherubim, God bless ’em. They’re pretty much restricted to fetch-and-carry work in hospitals today, but still, I think their mere presence has more than a dollop of medicinal benefit. Sometimes, just pulling smiles, even an occasional painful laugh, out of badly hurt patients seems to be their sole duty, and they’re certainly good at it!
One such candy-striper we’ll call Candy here, almost caused me to split my stitches. I could describe her more, but let’s just say with her red hair, freckle-flecked face and baby-blue eyes, I mistook her for one of my own Red Squad girls when I came out of a morphine fog and peeped her for the first time.
On one of Candy’s many “hangin’ out” visits, my surgeon had left my medical records on a side table in my room. The cherub was leaning on it when she commented that my file was the fattest she’d ever seen. I told her it was sort of a chronicle of “Life’s Lessons Learned”; representing the curriculum of the University of Hard Knocks. She smiled impishly, worth sixty mg’s of morphine, easy, patted it and said, “Gee, you musta learned a ton, Mister Connor! Can you graduate now?”
I splurted, ’sploded, knocked something over and people came runnin’. Good question, though … can I graduate?
Yeah; I’ve learned some things, both esoteric and mundane, and the learning, while free of the usual tuition and lab fees, often came at the cost of blood, pain and/or embarrassment. Here’s one: If you lose blood an’ suffer pain from any given social encounter, at least try not to embarrass yourself too! Not in front of your mates, anyway. That does nothin’ but make the sting of a wound worse. The sorta-corollary is, if a deadly incident ends with you bein’ deeply embarrassed but not grievously wounded, don’t give it a second thought — as long as you learn rom it.
In a fight for your life, You don’t shoot a man until you think he’s dead — You’ve got to shoot him until HE thinks he’s dead. Please hold any sanctimonious complaints about this one until you have fought men who, despite wounds which ought to drop a grizzly like a box ’o rocks, keep on determinedly killing your comrades and tryin’ their dangdest to kill you.
I’ve learned there are millions of men who are absolutely, crazily willing to shed blood, draw blood and die for their cause, however weird, ridiculous and twisted it is. But thank God, there are very few of them willing to put the necessary effort into the training it takes to be proficient at that enterprise. About training, I’ve learned that Amateurs train until they get the drill right; professionals train until they can’t get it wrong.
I’ve learned that real fights rarely resemble fighting scenes filmed by Hollywood, but lotsa times you’ll wind up fighting guys whose only weapons-handling training apparently came from the movies. If you go up against a guy who shoots using the “Gangsta Grip” — over his head, gun horizontal on its port side, sorta pushing his rounds toward you with jerky arm movements — just thank Hollywood for his poor technique right after you ding him.
I’ve learned the currency of some countries makes much better toilet paper than their toilet paper, and using it that way actually costs less than buying their toilet paper, if there is any available. Usually, there’s not. Continuing on this potty-path, I’ve also learned that when mortar rounds have you bracketed and the only hole in the pool-table plain you’re on is a pit toilet, Yes, you can do it … Just jump in. See “embarrassment” above.
This naturally leads to what I’ve learned about digging in under fire. Did you know that anytime you think you’re excavating at peak efficiency, your digging speed can triple when the first round impacts? Then triple again between the second and third “incomings?”
