Friday Fun Facts

So, there has been no shortage of Army fun facts this week. The really fun part about these obscure-seeming facts is that not knowing them can result in having to do pushups, so I'm all about memorizing the ones that I've seen other people screw up on. Here's an example: dog tags have two lengths of chain, the long one that goes around your neck and then a shorter one that hangs from the long chain. Didja know that each chain has a specific number of little metal balls? Neither did the schmo in the platoon next to mine who got dropped for not having the right answer. The long chain has 365 little balls, the short one 52. I missed Captain J.'s explanation of why this is significant, and while I'm not a Rhodes scholar, I think I could predict with reasonable certainty, as you probably can, at what each ball is supposed to represent. I think I'll just file that one away with all of the other random bits of info that I'm trying to keep from falling back out of my teeny little brain...Here's a fact that is less fun than it is a bit of a sigh of relief, although I had a feeling it was coming. Given that we are, and get reminded of this every day here, a country at war, absolutely everything we do is accomplished with that in mind. Therefore, the instructors have spent a significant amount of time on subjects that are relevant to prepare all of us for our eventual deployments, probably to a location that is sandy, windy, hot or any combination of the three. However, I am the only dentist who currently has their specialty training finished (a couple are scheduled to start next summer) and the dental officers in charge of us know that I'm just a geeky wire-bending orthodontist. So, today, we dentists are all getting the, "You might have to go to Iraq but don't worry..." speech when the Colonel points to me and says, "Except you." At which point, in front of the group, he tells me that the chance that I will ever see "action" is, oh, roughly zero, because, well, orthodontists are just, hmmm, how to say this politely, pretty useless in combat. (Guess he didn't hear about all of my Brazilian ju jitsu training yet...no, really Colonel R., I'm one seriously dangerous orthodontist!) Anyway, let me tell you how popular I am in the group now. Great, sir. Now people really want to hang out with me. No, they were okay with it, but it didn't stop half of them from finding me after class wanting to know how they can get into an orthodontic residency on the double... Ultimately, though, having someone tell me that I'm basically useless in a given situation has never sounded so good. All kidding aside, in a technical and official sense, I could be certainly be deployed at any moment just as easily as any other officer here, and I would go, and would be as capable of handling it as anyone else who's doing the training here with me. You don't get to this point in the process of joining the Army without having thoroughly examined your feelings on the topic of potential deployment to a combat zone, and while you never know exactly how you'll react to a situation, I'm willing to bet the great majority of us (myself included) would be able to handle a deployment order as capably as possible and do a good job in a tough environment. However, I thought I would include this information (however unofficial it might be) in case any of you reading this derive comfort from knowing that you will be more than likely able to find me in Darmstadt for the forseeable future, and not in a sandbox somewhere southeast of Europe. However, if they can line up a camel or two with raging malocclusions for me, well, then all bets are off...