April 14, 1992 - P1

April 14, 1992 - P2

April 14, 1992 - P3

14 April 92

yes! this is the 14th of april and yet again it is still snowing, and surprise believe it or not a decent duty so far. one ambulance run and maybe 1-2 walkins really early in the dury. then nothing and sitting here looking at this it got me to thinking about it, today (?) someone damaged a sprinkler (FIRE) Head in the garage. Hit it. (So Hard with something that the cieling 6-10 inches above it Had a 2-3 inch Hole init) Causing it to flood the supplies underneath it (and with the luck of fools, Well maybe the Irish) The fire department Just Happen to be on board, doing a New personnel orientation. Well they saved the day again, (I’m sure We’ll Hear about it again sometime) and got the water Turned off. but now, of course, the garage Has been but off limits except by approval of supply or operating management (of office) with appropriate log entries, (Heavy sigh) ya know, I wonder if they know bootcamp was many many years ago and plenty of miles away. I can understand the phone watche’s, and occasionally working a 7 day week, and I even understand morning muster 5 days a week, (for E-6 and below). We’ve Had a few people that have “Hosed” us into this. (E-5 and below this time)(not the kaki community), and the 5 day, 4-5 week work month (what ever happened to our Rec. day’s. oh yeah, little or No participation) What’s hard to understand

November 27, 1991 - P1

November 27, 1991 - P2

August 30, 1991 - March 28, 1992

8-30-91 HM2 Cotton B___, while in the superior preformance of his duties was removing change from the soda machine did wack his forehead on the machine cuasing damage to government property. Himself! Ha!

3-28-92 Name this cronic rock,

I’m an ‘HM,’ but I don’t do a medical job. I have a beak for a nose + look like a pear with legs. I can’t tell you how a level works, but I can nail up blocks of wood + call this a wall. I injoy talk with or about anyone including you if it’ll get me something otherwise get out of my way. My favorite past time activity is causing grief for anyone. I’m socially retarded + have no understanding of the proper way to talk with people. I do a poor job at everything I do + try to piss everyone off dealing with the job. If I were more intelligent I’d be dangerous. I dress like a female I think. If I had friends, I gladly made them enemies.

I’m the biggest rock.

Who am I? Paul H

It was an old joke that whenever we got hurt, we were “damaging Government property”. The military can seem a lot like a regular job sometimes, when viewed in small stretches of time and specific circumstance, but it is something very, very different. In the civilian world, you always have the right to get up from your desk and walk out of the building if you ever decide the job just absolutely sucks. There are consequences, of course, like loss of income and references, but you can walk out. In the military, even in nice hospital jobs, you always know in the back of your head that you committed to being there and following orders, so you have to ride it out. Skipping a day of work without authorization (in triplicate with carbon paper) or speaking disrespectfully to a superior (“boss” or “supervisor”) could eventually lead to time in the brig (jail), depending on who was involved and how things worked out. God forbid that someone ever chose to completely walk out of a military commitment. Packing up and skipping town is called “desertion”, and you would almost definitely end up in military jail, at the least. Fortunately, I liked my job and my life in the military. I never considered any course of action other than finishing my obligation, giving my all and getting the most out of it that I could. When I left the island three months early to start college, it was at the end of a very edifying enlistment.All these years later, I don’t think I could ever again be in the position of being required to respect and obey someone because of something like “rank”. I try to do the things I do because I want to do them, or need to do them, but I always know that if I was willing to make the sacrifices, I could chuck everything and start over somewhere else. I don’t have a “boss”, just a business partner, collaborators and people who I respect and would like to work with enough that I’m happy to do what’s required of me. Now, if I hit my head on something, I’m “damaging Calpernia property”.

The name of “The Rock Log” is a reference to “dumb patients”, aka “rocks”. In the second entry, “rock” is used as a general insult against a staff member. Here we have a flouting of military authority meant to be seen only by other “Rock Log” conspirators. Writing something like this and sharing it publicly would be sure to get someone in trouble. The hospital staff was so small that we all knew exactly who this person was slamming… and unfortunately for that person, the description was unkindly accurate. The riddler here was brave enough to sign the puzzle with his own name, quite a bold move. But the idea never ever entered my head that someone would ever use entries in the Rock Log to rat out another corpsman. No one ever did, to my knowledge. I’ve only chosen to share it now because almost 20 years have passed, and I’ve obscured identifying information. Loyalty is a hugely important quality in the military. Something which makes it all the more devastating and shocking on the rare occasion when one’s fellow soldiers break that trust.

June 24 / August 23 1991

24 June 91 2330

Distraught mother calls my 5 month old baby has yelow goo coming out of its L eye.

Hm – Has this happened before? (Mom – NO)

Hm – Calm Down get a warm cloth and wipe the “goog” from your childs L eye.

Mom – Should I bring her to the emergency room,

Hm – “If you feel this is an emergency.”

MOM – NO

Hm – Lets try the warm cloth first

MOM – I wiped it away and its gone.

Hm – That was pretty easy, wasn’t it.

MOM – Thank you for your help.

Hm – Saved another life! “And Dr. G___’s sanity”

The Poggman

8 – 23 – 91

As usual, hospital policy has proven its self again! Ha.

I’m now sitting here doing yet another duty (OPD’s job.)

We’ll probably never know exactly how many seconds it took to make this policy or what the singular reason was this time. Obviously the cry babies wined enough!! —

— I’m not impressed!

I’m not sure how the two greatly differing dates happened on this entry. It could be a case of empty space being reclaimed at a later date, or of someone writing the wrong number for the month (8 instead of 6).

The first story describes a mommy panicked over nothing, a typical annoyance that’s not unique to our little island ER by any means. Ever since the 1950′s model of parenthood (two parents, two sets of grandparents, close-knit community) went the way of the dinosaur, there are more and more young, single women learning their way around a first baby without that close mentorship. Little things that a doting grandma would laugh at and explain away become scary when a girl is alone with a fragile little infant.

Our island added the special circumstance of ensuring that everyone was several thousand miles of icy ocean away from their extended family, and the military skews toward such a young population anyway that it was a perfect storm of hapless inexperience.

But whereas an ER visit in the civilian world can rack up a huge out-of-pocket bill, in the military healthcare is free to servicemembers and their dependents, so we got a lot more BS visits from mildly panicked mommies and people who didn’t want to wait a day for a scheduled appointment. Being young ourselves, we lived to mercilessly mock the more idiotic visitors such as this one, in the privacy of our own Rock Log.

The second entry is standard bitching about dispersal of responsibility behind the scenes at the hospital. A “watch” or “standing duty” was a pretty catchall term for rotating into some time at an assigned post/duty station waiting for something to happen, or making sure something didn’t. That post was usually the front desk in the ER, but one of the great things about working at our small hospital on Adak was that we got to do a little bit of almost everything.

When we stood ER duty, we would work a full day in our department first — I worked in Hospital Admin during the day.  OPD (outpatient department) had a regular staff of several Corpsmen, doctors and nurses. They saw people in scheduled appointments for physicals, long-term medical problems, continuing care for after surgery or followup for injuries like broken bones with casts. It was sort of the basic hospital part of the hospital. Then there were smaller departments like Pharmacy, Lab and Radiology that were run by one or two specialists plus one of us from the larger (5-10 staffmember) departments rotating through on a duty or watch. I was trained to do basic lab tests like CBCs, LFTs, urological tests, pregnancy tests and cultures. I learned how to take several basic X-ray views (I was noted for my excellent Waters views). We could debride and suture wounds with ER doctor’s approval. We could fill and even custom mix prescriptions in the pharmacy. All kinds of things that you’d NEVER get to do in a big hospital.

When standing ER watch, we’d not only see walk-in patients. If there was a 911 call, we would actually jump up and drive the ambulance ourselves to the site, stabilize and transport the patient back to the ER and then treat them or hand them over to the MOOD (Medical Officer on Duty — the doctor standing their duty with us).

So a particularly busy day for me would look like this:

Work all day in the Admin department (I was the resident computer geek/admin NCO for our hospital due to my high test scores). After my workday ended, I would change from my daytime working blues uniform of slacks and dress shirt with embroidered rank on the left sleeve into my duty uniform: bell bottom dungarees (basically jeans that are easier to pull off if you’re in the water after a shipwreck), pressed blue cotton shirt with rank ironed onto the left arm, hard black leather shoes polished up to a nice shine and a white dixie-cup sailor hat. This uniform felt more like jeans and a t-shirt, and was more comfortable to do hard work in.

Go from my office in the West end of the hospital to the ER on the South end and start a rigorous changeover from the previous watchstanders. We had to go over whatever had happened during the previous shift, check all the supplies in our area (usually the junior Corpsman did that tedious task), and decide who had to do the checkover of the ambulance. Because of the cold, it was kept plugged in so that the battery was fully charged and the engine was warm and ready to go. The startup and radio were checked. Then all the millions of supplies onboard were checked off a big list that had been photocopied so many times that it looked like it had been written with a sponge. There are LOTS of supplies on an ambulance… bandages, instruments, diagnostic devices, medicines, on and on and on. I could list all the things we had to check in the ER and on the “rig” at duty changeover, but just imagine a LOT, double it and that will be about right.

God forbid anyone call in with an emergency during all that and we have to abandon the process until after it was handled. Once it was done, we just sat there, trading shifts of watching and sleeping between three watchstanders or so. If a particularly onerous patient came in, I could end up checking them in, taking vitals, getting the doctor up, drawing blood from them, doing the tests myself in the lab (sometimes actually dropping blood onto a slide and counting red blood cells!) or running complex automated testing machinery, then wheeling them into Radiology and shooting their X-rays myself, developing the X-rays, and taking all the labs, film and patient back to the doctor for the treatment plan. Whew, I’m tired all over again just after typing that! And this was after a full day of work.

Then it was off to 4-6 hours of sleep, barring an ambulance call, and back up to work again all day in the hospital Admin office. Depending on hospital staffing, we might be on an 8 day rotation (where we stood this kind of duty once every 8 days), or a day or two more or less. Definitely more of a job for twenty-somethings, ha ha.

Trust me, after a few of these shifts, you’d probably make fun of a mommy with a gooey-eyed baby, too.

June 23, 1991 - P1

June 23, 1991 - P2

23 JUN 91

@ 199 Security call √ for amb. 12 yr ♀ in water @ Kuluk beach condition not known @ this time. Amb disp. to beach c P.O. B___, P.O. A___ + P.O. V___. Arrive on beach South end. Security on North end of beach c PT. Hotel #1 proceed ↑ the beach with I P.O. B___ driving the amb in four wheel drive proceeding c out difficulty. Security call on the radio stating: We have the PT will meet you @ the hospital. I went to turn around on the beach. The amb would not turn sharp enough so I had to stop. When the amb came to a stop it sank in the sand. I was able to work it back and get it turned around. We moved about 40′ sinking as we toward the driveway off the beach. Unable to move any further V___ + I returned to the hosp c security. P.O. A___ stay c the amb waiting for the tow truck.

1930: PO A___ able to work the amb closer to the drive way. Tow truck arrives on scene. CONT→

1945. P.O A___ calls via radio to inform us that the towtruck is stuck. Blocking the driveway. A roadgrader is then dispatched to the scene and is able to free the tow truck and amb.

2030 Amb returns c no damage noted. The CDO HMV M___, OOD HM2 V___, Duty Crew HM2 W___, HM3 B___, HN H___

PT Released p normal exam

Wow. Basically, what happened here was this: Island security called for an ambulance at 7:00pm, because a 12 year old girl was at some point in the water at Kuluk Beach. The chilly, pewter-colored water of the Bering Sea could get cold enough to cause hypothermia and loss of muscle control within minutes unless the swimmer wears a very insulated drysuit. It was unlikely this little girl had one on, so depending on how submerged she was, for how long, she could be hypothermic and at Death’s door, she could be drowned or have water inhalation from almost drowning, or any number of other cold and water related problems. Plus, at certain places along the beaches, enormous and brutal waves would crash against the shore, hammering into jagged brownish-black volcanic rock, boulders and gravel. Potentially a very serious call.The team arrived, and apparently it was a best-case scenario — most likely, she had simply been wading in the water or ducked under once and ran back out. She was probably very. very cold and shaking, which could be taken care of with a blasting ambulance heater and a load of blankets on the way to the hospital for a checkup. So thankfully she was in not likely in immediate danger.

Then things went typically Adak wrong. The ambulance got stuck in the sand on the beach. They called a tow-truck, which also got stuck. A road grader, which is a huge vehicle used by the Seabees to make and maintain our precious paved roads, was called in to drag everyone out. The whole thing took what was most likely a tense and embarrassing 45 minutes. The little girl turned out just fine.

———————-

Glossary:

AMB is ambulance, DISP is dispatched.

Hotel 1 was a typical ambulance call sign for use on the CB radio. In military alphabet parlance, “Hotel” stands for “H”, which represents “Hospital”. Typical of military hoop-jumping and circles-going-in. Why not just say “Hospital 1″? “Hospital” isn’t in the official military alphabet. “Hotel” is.

A small “p” with a line over it means “after”. A small “a” with a line over it means “before”. Think “post” and “ante”.

PO is “Petty Officer”, a Navy Non-Commissioned Officer rank that is a leadership rank, made up of paygrades E4 and up. HM1/HM2/HM3 is “Hospital Corpsman 1st/2nd/3rd class” (lower numbers are higher ranks).

CDO is Chief Duty Officer, a watchstanding position that someone is assigned to for a watch period (like being a manager during a particular shift at a civilian job). Likewise OOD is “Officer of the Day”. Duty Crew are the workers standing a watch under the CDO and OOD.

June 14, 1991

A 1400, afternoon sickcall of “SeaBee Day”, one of our well known “frequent flyers” presents himself to the ER c the c/o “a battery blew up in my face” (PT appears healthy). As the SeaBee is standing at the sink irrigating his mouth and ears c a bulbe syringe (deserted by the two initial corpsman that weaz treating him) hey hey hey let me tell the rest. Dr. TAD surgeon pokes his head into ER – asking “What’s going on in here” Corpsman #1 (me) matter of factly states “this patient here is treating himself”

“What happened to you” Dr. TAD asks

“A battery blew up in my face” the Seabee answers, giving the typical Seabee hand salute.

“Hm – be sure to get all that outta there, it’s not good for you” Dr. TAD responds. The Dr. nonchalantly meanders out the door. The two bystanding corpsman have tears from laughing ~ and of course the Seabee is still purging his ear canal with a quizzical look.

MAYBE YOU JUST HAD TO BE THERE

The Seabees tended to stay pretty separate from the groups I hung out with. The hospital staff barracks were to the North of the hospital in a barren field on the way to Clam Bay and the remote Contractors Camp. Seabees and other island staff lived in much bigger barracks up the hill by way of a South then West then North road, near the PX, chow hall and many other clustered facilities (near the recreation hall on my Map of Adak). I kept to myself quite a bit in my first year on Adak… I can’t really even remember what exactly I did for amusement other than brave one of the occasional outdated movies in the base theater or go to the mini mart with my friend “Alex” to purchase Playboy and Playgirl magazines to exchange with each other later.

The level of medical care described in this log entry is not typical of our hosptial, by the way. What made this humorous was how atypically laissez-faire it seemed, but actually with irrigation like this it’s easier to let the patient run the water themselves if they are ambulatory, not in a lot of pain and calm. Seabees are tough as nails, anyway… imagine construction workers with semi-automatic weapons and hand-to-hand combat training, and you’ll get an idea. Check out their website here — WARNING: stupidly loud auto-playing music and battle sound effects. LOL boys… https://www.seabee.navy.mil/

—————————–

Glossary:

Sick call was a set time where people could just walk in without an appointment and be seen for medical issues.

A small c with a line over it means “with”. A small s with a line over it means “without”

c/o means “complaint of” or “complains of”

TAD stands for Temporary Active Duty. Adak was a bit of an exotic duty station, so various doctors with specialties would sometimes be assigned to Temporary Active Duty on our island for a short period of time, either for their own training in a smaller, more extreme medical setting or because it would be good for us to have local access to a medical specialist such as dermatology or orthopedic surgeon to treat pending cases, rather than shipping the patients all the way to Elmendorf AFB on the Alaskan mainland. Corpsmen and any other military person could be assigned (or request) TAD for all kinds of reasons — which usually involved “getting off this damned island for a few weeks”.

June 11, 1991

Started Log 11 June 91

11 Jun 91

At app. 0945 during morning sick call, Faith (Dr T___) convincingly stands in the hallway, (with many on lookers and over hearers,) and diagnoses a PT c “broncardis“?

Great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat, chopped up baby parakeet, French fried eye balls swimmin in a pool of blood, me without my spoon

F. A. T___
HM3 USN
_______

0 appt. excepted now. New log for check-ins how long will it last. Appt. lasts for a month

All EXL pads, leads and Quick Pace patches are now together in IDC office R ^ cabinet

A clean hospital is a happy hospital.

26 day till Bourbon Street, but who’s counting?

The first page… Legend had it that there had been previous Rock Logs, and that someone had taken the last one with them when they left the island. That seemed terribly selfish to me, although I was obviously an archivist of information myself and a great lover of keepsakes. When it finally came my time to leave the island much later, I slipped off to the copier and made the duplicates that you see here rather than taking the tempting “genuine article”. I left the original right there in the drawer.

Faith T___ was a young corpsman (see that gender thing?) who, if memory serves, was sometimes ridiculed for being less than bright. Thus her nickname, “Dr. T___”. She was actually just young, but we were never ones to miss an opportunity to slam someone in a good-natured, morale-building way.

The four initialed lines of text below her stamp read like standard hospital log entries, so this particular book probably started out as a normal log but was abandoned after a few entries and re-purposed in a much funnier way.

This page wraps up with a countdown to Bourbon street, a not unusual goal for our overworked and island-bound crew. At the time I reflexively and silently judged this as likely to be a wanton trip revolving around guzzling mass quantities of alcohol — which it probably was, but nowadays that sounds like a blast. Booze-soaked parties were fairly typical for young military folks, and  upon every milestone experience in the Navy, everyone had practically begged me to “have a drink”: Boot Camp graduation, our first liberty in Chicago, Corps School graduation, FMSS graduation, returning from the war and many other events. I refused. I had never tasted alcohol and hadn’t even known anyone who drank openly when I grew up, except for my grandmother, who occasionally had a heartbreaking beer. As internally judgmental as I was then, of course now we have this.

I did express a church-ladyish disdain tinged with humor at times, but I don’t remember ever morally sermonizing anyone aloud. My refusals of alcohol, cigarettes and sex were always politely declined. Sometimes I even lied: “Alcohol upsets my stomach”, “I’m saving myself for marriage”, etc. It wasn’t religious fervor (any more) keeping me “pure”. I was definitely not only atheistic but anti-religion at this point. But a lifetime of programming is difficult to undo in a few short years, and I didn’t even realize how conservative I still was. I believe I actually thought I was a bit edgy and rebellious, which just goes to show that however you see yourself right now, you’ll probably realize that you’re wrong a few decades down the line.

——

Glossary:

A little “c” with a line over it is medical abbreviation for “with”. “PT” is obviously “patient”. “App” is “approximately”. “HM3″ is “Hospital Corpsman, Petty Officer 3rd Class”, which is military paygrade E4 and considered an entry-level leadership position or “NCO” (non-commissioned officer).

These are my memories. Almost two decades have passed, not to mention a course of government-administered nerve gas and several corporeal rebuilds. I’ll do the best I can with details, but no promises.

Many people know me as a showgirl, but today, on Veteran’s Day, let me begin a story about an interesting chapter from back in the days of my military career. After serving as a decorated Field Medical Combat Specialist with the Marines in the first Gulf War, I finished my tour of duty in the Navy Hospital Corps on the remote island of Adak, Alaska. In the scant two years I was there, I saw extremes of weather, nature, emotion and injury. I helped to rescue a wrecked Chinese airplane and helped to recover a ruined WWII plane that crashed on a nearby island (pix and story soon!).

To frame this story, I’m going to re-publish pages from something called The Rock Log. Part pre-Internet forum, part post-80′s zine and entirely Military Medical, it  was our sometimes unkind but often funny informal record of the stupid things that happened in the 1991-1992 military Emergency Room of Branch Hospital, Adak, Alaska, FPO AP 96506 (I can’t believe I remember the numbers!). These were interesting times for service members, with a newly elected President and the opening of a new decade.

In the military, hand-written logs of most every official action were kept in hardbound olive green books — from hourly rounds through the always deserted nighttime hospital to ambulance calls to each bloody walk-in patient with a new fist fighting story. In hospital work, hand-written records were kept of meticulously measured vital signs, fluid in-and-outs, medication administration and countless other things. It was a culture within a culture of hand written records, so I suppose it was only natural that one of those green notebooks would eventually find its way from Supply to a less official, more hidden spot in a drawer under the ER check-in window.

In 1991, when The Rock Log began. I wasn’t yet living on the tiny frozen island in the Bering sea. In the depths of a profound depression after the war, I would eventually choose it as a duty station with the hope that there, I could work up the nerve to either kill myself or figure out what the Hell my problem was. (Obviously, the latter happened. Yay.) Still shaking sand from Saudi Arabia out of my seabag, I took an eleven hour flight over 1,300 miles of steel gray water and shredded clouds, to the next most remote place that I could find in my military career.

As I mentioned, I was a Field Medical Combat Specialist in the Navy’s Hospital Corps. As a holdover from earlier times, both men and women in the Hospital Corps were known as “Corpsmen”, a gendering that would later become a bit embarrassing. We were a fiercely proud group of sailors who combined duties of nurses, EMTs, combat medics and hospital support staff alongside light weapons training and standard military work. Graduating second in my class had allowed me to choose my first duty station after the war from among those needing staff, and to the astonishment of my classmates I picked Adak, “Birthplace of the Winds”. That title was prophetic and would be proven on many long nights in close quarters with gaseously juvenile military boys.

Adak Island’s strategic location between the US and Japan made it valuable during World War II, and it became home to an airfield and support operations. The Navy had maintained it since then for various purposes, some of which were pointedly not discussed by residents and about which I never asked. In our free time, residents occasionally hiked out to explore abandoned 1940′s tech and structures from the island’s early days, now left decaying in the tundra.

There were only a couple thousand people on the island when I arrived, a population mostly made up of service members, their spouses and their children. Surprisingly, NCOs (non-commissioned officers) and up were allowed to ship their POVs (personally owned vehicles) to the island, so despite being incredibly remote we had cars, children and civilian spouses adding a sense of normalcy to what could have felt like an outpost on the Moon.

Whether it was a SeaBee (Construction Battalion) dropping a heavy power tool on his foot or a newborn baby with a temperature, the seventy-two staff members of Branch Hosptial, Adak, “adapted and overcame”. We saw fist fights and gonorrhea, frost bite and parasites, acne and a case of 1990′s HIV.  There were also the ones we couldn’t save: suicides (shotgun and drowning), exposure deaths (picked clean by eagles except for booted feet) and poor Diana, whose car tumbled down a slippery tundra-covered ravine and into a frigid, rushing lash of gray water.

In 1991, I was twenty years old, and I defined myself by the things I had not done. Raised in what I call a Southern fundamentalist Christian cult, I had never tasted a drop of alcohol, and didn’t want to. I didn’t seek out or discuss sex or pornography. I had missed most of the music, film, television and pop culture of my youth (the 1980′s) and in general I had very little experience or common ground at all with average people. I often rattled off a checklist as shorthand to explain to people why I probably seemed weird to them: I grew up never experiencing Disney movies, E.T., Star Wars, John Hughes, Madonna, Rock and Roll, bowling alleys, pool halls, organized sports, school dances, mixed-sex swimming pools, or dating. It varied slightly every time. Whatever I was bitter about missing that week. I had spent the last few years struggling to catch up on at least the most basic cultural touch stones, renting VHS cassettes chosen from carefully researched lists and scanning the unfamiliar names in Rolling Stone magazine for clues as to who I might like.

I can say those things, and you can have an idea of what the world looks like from within that experience, but I doubt that I can ever explain it in a way that I feel is understood. The stories I’ve heard that most closely resonate are those of children who escape an upbringing in other religious cults. It is observing the world from inside a cloudy glass bubble for the entirety of one’s formative years, until one day the bubble pops and all the overwhelming colors and sounds of reality suddenly crowd in, expecting to be recognized.

As a smart kid, I did my best to fake it and blend in, but I probably seemed like a borderline autistic weirdo of the highest order to regular people. My sense of humor was arcane yet unhoned. I had not yet replaced a Christian directive to absorb abuse with an ability to deflect it by laughing at myself. I wished in secret desperation to know how other people saw me and what they thought of me, but I didn’t have any ability to recognize or understand that information.

All that has little to do with the story of the Rock Log itself, but it helps to describe who I was on Adak Island when I arrived in 1992. To further wrinkle this story, I was living in a male body at the time. A plain, mawkish vessel that weighted me deeper and deeper toward a singularity of depression, even as I allowed myself to realize feelings I had suppressed since childhood. “I’m so ugly”, a lifelong mantra repeated countless times every day of my remembered life, had picked up a slowly coalescing companion. An idea more than actual words. A clarifying sadness that I was not “like them”, like the women I saw at such a distance in my life.

The version of me who arrived on Adak was deeply horrified at the coarse humor, language and behavior that was the lifeblood of Navy enlisted culture and which was found frequently in The Rock Log. When someone added crude breasts to my cartoon of a fat little girl, I was genuinely disgusted and actually expressed my indignant outrage by writing a morlaistic note with a drawing of myself above a sign that said, “Down with breasts“. What the fuck was I thinking… Those were three words that few Navy males, or ANYONE wanting to pose as a heterosexual male, would dare to utter to their friends. It’s a testament to the relative coolness of my shipmates that I wasn’t immediately branded a Class III “faggot” and shunned — or worse. I expressed these things with absolutely no realization of how hilarious and ripe-for-griefing it would make me look to my shipmates… The very phrase “mouth of a sailor” was inspired by the people with whom I spent my days and nights, and they worked hard to keep its meaning alive.

As a lifelong diarist and archivist, in my last week on Adak in late 1993 I photocopied what was left of The Rock Log and tucked it away among all my other papers. It was on one of my last 32 hour ER shifts, in the dead of an Aleutian night, with the whole hospital breathing in and out through the swinging doors of the ER as it waited for the next patient to walk in. It may not be interesting in the least, I have no idea, but nonetheless I plan to write a little about each group of pages in a series, just because it was one of the most amazing times of my life, and I’ve had a fucking amazing life up to this point, believe me. The whole Rock Log is posted to my Flickr account if you must read ahead, but I think it will be more interesting with my notes here in the blog.

So when you read The Rock Log, keep in mind your cast of characters. Your narrator: a feckless rube recently fled from the grasp of a cult and fallen into the rough but loving arms of the US Navy. Your contributors: young men and women from small towns across America, trained for war and committed to saving lives, dealing with stress through humor. President Bill Clinton has just been elected to his first term, to the horror of many softly conservative military folks and the secret hopeful thrill of deeply closeted GLBT service members who took his promise to “let gays into the military” at face value. There was no internet to speak of in my world. No one I knew had a cell phone. Just cold, cold weather beating against the glass doors of our Emergency Room while we waited for the next tragedy to walk in.

Tomorrow: I discuss Page 1, religion and military boozing!

Adak Island - Click for interactive Google Map

This a notice from Congress for us! Click to read the full Congressional Record!

See photos of Adak, then and now!

Click READ MORE below to read more, and see more pix and maps!

Shemya - Click for Google Map

Shemya is little more than a pit stop for airplanes to refuel, and the few military personnel who lived there were particularly tough, but they were not equipped to handle a disaster of that size. I arrived in the second plane load of medical personnel to find the Chinese passengers all spread out in the airplane hangar, most laid out on makeshift cots. It was a crazy, long day. I got lots of opportunities to improve my IV insertion techniques and cut off clothing with trauma scissors. The language barrier was a big obstacle, too. I don’t know if anyone on either of our islands spoke Chinese, but luckily some few of the passengers spoke some limited English.

The commendation letter

We got everyone stabilized, except for one poor soul who died. Later that day, a big plane from the mainland in Alaska arrived with medical teams to medivac the wounded back to Elmendorf Air Force Base hospital. I made the long trip (7 or 8 hours?) from Shemya to Anchorage with my patients, monitoring IV bags and vitals. It was quite a day for all of us on the Adak medical team.

Be sure to check out my Google Map with interactive labels, too!

If you’re REALLY bored, read the Natn’l Transportation Safety Board’s Official Incident Report (PDF) ]]> http://therocklog.com/2008/05/21/calpernia-rescues-downed-chinese-airplane/feed/ 8