"If you're gonna be stupid..."

Friday was more fun in the field. We did lots of fun things, most of which I'm going to have to cover later, but one of the things that we all need to know how to do is act the part of the crazy combat medic..whoo hoo! What exactly does that entail, you ask? Well, in a training capacity, what you wind up doing is getting into a group with three other people and you are issued a litter (basically a field stretcher...think canvas rectangle with a pole on each side for carrying a person) and a dummy to act as your "casualty". Sounds easy enough, right? Well, to be honest, there's a little more to the exercise than just making friends with the dummy. The instructors are nice enough to set you up with an obstacle course through the same Blackjack-infested forest that I fell in love with a couple of weeks back. So, I'm the only girl in my group, but lucky for me, one of the three guys that I'm grouped with is a former combat medic...score! So what if I'm a good 6 inches shorter than everybody else in my group, I'm tough, darnit! This is going to be too easy! No looking stupid for me today! We take off, and combat medic guy is in charge. Things are going along swimmingly, and I'm holding my own with no problem when we turn a corner in the woods and come up to an 8-foot high concrete wall. Aha, I think, so this is what puts the obstacle in obstacle course. The objective of this lovely part of the exercise is to get the litter, the dummy, yourself and your three teammates over the wall. No problem, right? So, we're about 12 or 14 feet away from the wall when combat medic dude glances over at me and says under his breath, "Hey, if you need me to help you up..." which totally lights me up and I'm like, "No way!" as though I've ever tried to scale a completely smooth 8-foot concrete wall in my entire life. But, hey, I've got my pride, right? Anyway, we get to the wall, prop the litter up on top, and combat medic guy stands back like, "Well, I gotta see this for myself." So I back away from the wall, take a good run and jump....FLAP! Right into the wall! You could acutally hear my kneecaps hit the concrete. It felt great, I gotta tell ya. Somehow, I did manage to throw my arms up and over the wall, but the, uh, other problem that I didn't totally anticipate (beside the complete lack of any toeholds on a completely smooth concrete wall) was that the concrete slab was easily 18 inches thick: my fingertips barely reached the opposite side of the wall. So, I'm just casually hanging on the wall, working out my next move and trying to act cool. I can still pull this out of the fire for all womankind, right? And that's when I realize that my fingers are coming loose from the opposite side of the wall. But I'm not one to give up easily: oh nooooo! I'm hanging on, darn it! So, instead of just jumping back down and admitting defeat, I slid, in total slow-mo fashion, mind you, ALL THE WAY back down the front side of the wall. Fortunately, the combat medic guy still had a pretty good sense of humor about the situation at this point. He gave me a boost and wound up pretty much catapulting me over the wall: I went absolutely flying across...the sand pit on the opposite side was my new best friend for a couple of seconds. So, just when you begin to wonder if the fun is really over, there's always some barbed wire to save the day! We turn the corner and ta daaaaa...more sand with barbed wire strung up in a criss-cross pattern about 24 inches above the sand. The idea is that you have to, you guessed it, crawl under the wire without disturbing it or losing your patient. Anyway, we get up to the obstacle and I give the command to put the patient down on the ground. At this point, I'm in charge of the show, so this next part I have absolutely noone to blame but myself. We all get down on the ground and are ready to duck under the wire, and for some reason or another, when I yelled the command to start crawling, the guy behind me got so motivated to get the heck back out of the sand that he pretty much threw the litter, dummy and all, up into the air. At this point, I've got a face full of sand, and I totally don't see this stretcher and dummy flying through the air from behind me, and lucky me, the whole operation landed on the back of my arm, right above my elbow. It didn't hurt too much at the time, fortunately, but I can tell you that that it's gonna be one sexy-lookin' bruise here in a couple of days! Good grief, I say! Which brings me to my favorite saying of the week, courtesy of one of my instructors: "If you're gonna be stupid, you better be tough." I be-lieve you, sir.