It has been true of each of my deployments that by the end, my knowledge of the situation is at it's peak, my flying skills are good, but have fallen off from their peak (somewhere around month 3), my apathy is at a maximum and my patience is at a minimum.
All of this is a left-handed way of apologizing for the fact that haven't written many good entries lately. Yesterday was another helluva day at work; they never end. Despite my best efforts, we had a number of late takeoffs, and it is hard to care very much about that since whether I care or not, or work against them or not, they still happen and no one else cares. So yeah, apathy, because the only thing I can really change around here is whether or not I get an ulcer. I have no patience right now to write decently constructed entries about things here. It takes too much effort to write clearly, try to explain things from a non-military POV, screen it for opsec, proofread it and post it. (Not to mention the fact that I don't care to re-live my work hours during my free time.) I might do some backdated posting after I get back to the states, hopefully I will at least finish some of the 10 or so draft entries I have going right now.
So the deployment story I will spend the time to write today: I spent a few minutes face down on concrete on my way to chow before this for incoming fire.
Anyway.
Sorry for the tangent. This entry was motivated by the recent news story of the older man who was struck by a car in Hartford recently.
(I am reading back each way I have written this and there isn't at least some part of each that comes our sounding preachy, self-righteous, or insensitive. So do I post this? At risk of seeming an ass, I will...I'd rather be a bad writer than not one at all.)
I am reminded of some things I learned in the Boy Scouts. The proper thing to do would be to block off traffic, send someone to call the police and emergency services, then render first aid, but only if you think he's going to die right there. If he's breathing and not bleeding to death, you shouldn't touch him, and if he's conscious, you should tell him not to move either until trained help arrives.
A note on sending someone for help: You have look one of the on-lookers in the eyes, ask for their name, and then say, "Hello John Smith, nice to meet you. Go call 911 immediately and tell them there has been an accident at 123 Main Street and they need to send police and an ambulance." If you can do this while shaking their hand or slapping them on the shoulder, so much the better, it distracts them momentarily from the panic and confusion.
This last step is important and illustrates a common problem in urgent situations involving groups of people: no one's in charge, no one wants to be in charge, and everyone thinks someone else has all the relevant information and is doing something. The name step is important because it cuts through the herd mentality. Most people will react fairly well in a urgent situation if they are given simple instructions for tasks they've done before that make sense.
All of this is a round about way of saying that while the reaction of onlookers might have been slow, I don't think it was criminally so (the hit and run drivers are another story, and they need to be punished). Within 1 min 10 seconds, there were several people standing in the street around the victim and there was a police car on the scene. I think that's probably competitive with the response time in any city in an industrialized nation.
Thoughts? I haven't had much time to scan open source news for public impression of this incident.
06 June 2008
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1 comment:
And to think when I had a serrated knife stuck in my leg this past Monday it took me 9 minutes to get the young lady at 911 to transfer me to the right place and over 5 minutes for one of the cop cars to come talk to me until the ambulance showed up, and none of the cars that drove by stopped... unfortunately my apathy was pretty high too (or is that adrenalin? i forget) anyway, how awesome would a 70-second response time be?
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