Finally . . . But the Work Continues

I am finally leaving San Jose. I am reminded of a time when I was in the Rangers when we invaded Oregon. We flew down to Oregon from Washington, parachuted in with enough gear for a week of field operations with a planned mission to attack a site on the seventh day. Ergo there was a lot of walking to do and a lot of gear on our backs.

The highlight of this training mission was that a Men's Fitness contributor was going to be accompanying us on our invasion. He met us at the drop zone and grabbed his much more stylish and well kitted out backpack, and followed along with us as we moved south. Where we were all camo'ed up, with darkened faces and hands, patrol caps, weapons and the whole magilla, he looked like a Travel Planet host.

After three days of patrol bases all day and walking through woods at night, it rained most of that time and at one point we had to sit out some hail , he had to be medivac'ed out to a hospital with suspected kidney problems as he had started pissing blood. It was all quite a let down till we read the article  I remember that he described the insertion and the movement well, and that took up a full 50% of the article. The other 50% was the history of the Ranger's and their modern day mission. The last passage described his needed to be helicoptered home and he ended by saying something like, "while I sit here hooked up to a machine to check my kidney function those guys will still be out there walking. When I go home and get my dinner, go to sleep, and wake up, they will still be out there walking. It won't be till three more full cycles of waking, eating and sleeping that those guys will finally get to their objective, and then it might get hard for them."

That's the way I feel now. As I mentioned a few posts ago when I discussed coming up with novel ideas from real world experiences, I just spent the last four days onsite in California trying to help an electrical plant deal with the release of thousands and thousands of gallons of mineral oil onto the ground and into surrounding properties after an incident a few nights ago. Each affected area has to be scraped up, dug up to a depth of 6 inches minimum, and in some cases several feet, then hauled off and disposed and the site remade. It's a huge amount of work. And while I'm flying back to see the fam, those guys are still out there digging.

the only bright spot is that we eventually took over Oregon and won the war. I'm sure we can do the same for Northern California.