F
Field Ethos
Guest
By Will Dabbs, MD
Tragically, this story is true. I sincerely wish it wasn’t.
Testosterone is the red-headed stepchild of sex hormones. Feminists lament the very existence of the stuff right up until they need some intransigent jar opened or a bunch of bloodthirsty terrorists killed. Without testosterone, the world would admittedly be a much more peaceful, graceful place. However, the species would also die out in a generation, so there’s that.
The average life expectancy for an American man is currently 75.8 years. A woman born at exactly the same time can expect to live 81.1 years. That’s not because women are somehow more adroit at aging than men. It’s due to the male animal’s tendency to do lyrically stupid things.
Ninety-three percent of the incarcerated population in the United States is male. It’s not usually women who are out there robbing banks and blowing stuff up. That’s mostly guys. We really can’t help it. It’s all just biology.
I spent eight years on active duty flying Army helicopters. During that time, I was old enough to embrace responsibility yet still too young to have developed much practical sense. That is a dangerous space indeed.
I was the operations officer for a medium-lift assault helicopter unit. Every six months or so the post put on a CALFEX. CALFEX is mil-speak for Combined Arms Live-Fire Exercise. Think attack helicopters, tanks, infantry, close air support, and more artillery than might reasonably be catalogued. The piece de resistance was always a B1 or a B52 that screamed by at low level and slathered the impact area with a breathtaking volume of parachute-retarded Mk82 500-pound bombs. There’s no telling what all that cost, but it was a reliable crowd-pleaser.
We’d do a dress rehearsal on Thursday in front of a bunch of empty bleachers to make sure we got the timing right. Some photogenic captain served as announcer. Then on Friday, they’d open up the event to civilians so everybody could see what they were getting for their tax dollars.
I had flown in several of these things but had never watched one. As such, I posted other crews to the mission and began scheming out how best to take in the show. One of my warrant officer buddies tagged along.
The actual Friday event was invariably crowded. The MPs closed off all of the roads on Thursday to keep idiots like us from doing exactly what we ultimately did. However, I had flown aeroscout helicopters in this area and knew every little goat trail. I stashed my pickup truck, and we struck out on foot in search of a nice vantage.
We cut through some heavy trees and eventually came out in a clearing where the engineers had parked a massive bulldozer. My friend and I crawled up on the big dozer to enjoy the show. We could hear the announcer just fine. However, they couldn’t see us, and we couldn’t see them.
The CALFEX was everything we had hoped it might be. The artillery in particular seemed quite spectacular. We could feel the blast waves thump us in the chest, which was pretty epic. Then the announcer declared that we would now get to see an armored unit in the assault.
Tanks are just plain awesome. The M1A2 SEPv2 Abrams tips the scales at 73 tons yet will still earn you a speeding ticket in most American urban spaces. It sports a massive 120mm smoothbore gun, a pair of .30-caliber M240 machine guns, and a .50-caliber Ma Deuce in the commander’s cupola. As it is powered by a jet turbine engine, it also makes a really distinctive sound. We now heard this very sound, but we heard it behind us. It seemed we had slipped out into the impact area by mistake. The bulldozer was actually a target.
These tanks came screaming out of their fighting positions spitting fire. We had failed to notice them during our covert ingress. My buddy and I dove between the tracks of the bulldozer as the tanks opened up on us with their machine guns.
They say tracers look like big glowing basketballs when fired at you. Well, that’s freaking real. The tanks swerved around the ventilated Caterpillar and began throwing main gun rounds downrange at targets well distant.
My friend and I tore back toward the pickup truck as though we were on fire. Once I realized that I wasn’t actually going to die, other weighty matters came into play.
I was actually one of very few commissioned aviators on this particular Army post on flight status. That meant if somebody saw a captain in a flight suit scampering about downrange during the CALFEX it would not take a great deal of deductive skill to determine who that was. I wasn’t sure what such a thing might do to a young officer’s career, but I suspected nothing good.
My friend and I made it back to the truck filthy and winded but unhurt. We swore each other to secrecy and puttered back to post where we each went to our respective homes, took showers, and changed clothes. We then rolled back into work as though nothing ever happened. It was years before I breathed a word of that experience to anybody, and now I share it with you.
The post Testosterone Toxicity appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
Tragically, this story is true. I sincerely wish it wasn’t.
Testosterone is the red-headed stepchild of sex hormones. Feminists lament the very existence of the stuff right up until they need some intransigent jar opened or a bunch of bloodthirsty terrorists killed. Without testosterone, the world would admittedly be a much more peaceful, graceful place. However, the species would also die out in a generation, so there’s that.
Statistics
The average life expectancy for an American man is currently 75.8 years. A woman born at exactly the same time can expect to live 81.1 years. That’s not because women are somehow more adroit at aging than men. It’s due to the male animal’s tendency to do lyrically stupid things.
Ninety-three percent of the incarcerated population in the United States is male. It’s not usually women who are out there robbing banks and blowing stuff up. That’s mostly guys. We really can’t help it. It’s all just biology.
God Watches Out for Stupid People
I spent eight years on active duty flying Army helicopters. During that time, I was old enough to embrace responsibility yet still too young to have developed much practical sense. That is a dangerous space indeed.
I was the operations officer for a medium-lift assault helicopter unit. Every six months or so the post put on a CALFEX. CALFEX is mil-speak for Combined Arms Live-Fire Exercise. Think attack helicopters, tanks, infantry, close air support, and more artillery than might reasonably be catalogued. The piece de resistance was always a B1 or a B52 that screamed by at low level and slathered the impact area with a breathtaking volume of parachute-retarded Mk82 500-pound bombs. There’s no telling what all that cost, but it was a reliable crowd-pleaser.
We’d do a dress rehearsal on Thursday in front of a bunch of empty bleachers to make sure we got the timing right. Some photogenic captain served as announcer. Then on Friday, they’d open up the event to civilians so everybody could see what they were getting for their tax dollars.
I had flown in several of these things but had never watched one. As such, I posted other crews to the mission and began scheming out how best to take in the show. One of my warrant officer buddies tagged along.
The actual Friday event was invariably crowded. The MPs closed off all of the roads on Thursday to keep idiots like us from doing exactly what we ultimately did. However, I had flown aeroscout helicopters in this area and knew every little goat trail. I stashed my pickup truck, and we struck out on foot in search of a nice vantage.
We cut through some heavy trees and eventually came out in a clearing where the engineers had parked a massive bulldozer. My friend and I crawled up on the big dozer to enjoy the show. We could hear the announcer just fine. However, they couldn’t see us, and we couldn’t see them.
The CALFEX was everything we had hoped it might be. The artillery in particular seemed quite spectacular. We could feel the blast waves thump us in the chest, which was pretty epic. Then the announcer declared that we would now get to see an armored unit in the assault.
Tanks are just plain awesome. The M1A2 SEPv2 Abrams tips the scales at 73 tons yet will still earn you a speeding ticket in most American urban spaces. It sports a massive 120mm smoothbore gun, a pair of .30-caliber M240 machine guns, and a .50-caliber Ma Deuce in the commander’s cupola. As it is powered by a jet turbine engine, it also makes a really distinctive sound. We now heard this very sound, but we heard it behind us. It seemed we had slipped out into the impact area by mistake. The bulldozer was actually a target.
These tanks came screaming out of their fighting positions spitting fire. We had failed to notice them during our covert ingress. My buddy and I dove between the tracks of the bulldozer as the tanks opened up on us with their machine guns.
A Trace of Testosterone Toxicity
They say tracers look like big glowing basketballs when fired at you. Well, that’s freaking real. The tanks swerved around the ventilated Caterpillar and began throwing main gun rounds downrange at targets well distant.
My friend and I tore back toward the pickup truck as though we were on fire. Once I realized that I wasn’t actually going to die, other weighty matters came into play.
I was actually one of very few commissioned aviators on this particular Army post on flight status. That meant if somebody saw a captain in a flight suit scampering about downrange during the CALFEX it would not take a great deal of deductive skill to determine who that was. I wasn’t sure what such a thing might do to a young officer’s career, but I suspected nothing good.
My friend and I made it back to the truck filthy and winded but unhurt. We swore each other to secrecy and puttered back to post where we each went to our respective homes, took showers, and changed clothes. We then rolled back into work as though nothing ever happened. It was years before I breathed a word of that experience to anybody, and now I share it with you.
The post Testosterone Toxicity appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...