The first time I got blown up I didn't think anything of it. The second time, I began to perceive a trend.
When I graduated from High School my father got me a summer job working on one of the seismic exploration crews that reported to him in his role as Chief Geophysicist of a giant global oil company. A seismic crew explores for oil and gas deposits using wave physics. Onshore this involved spreading thousands of specialized microphones called geophones over a large area and then placing high explosives in sequences of holes drilled in the ground and blowing them up - in our case usually five charges at a time. The broad spectrum shock waves generated by the explosions then propagate through the ground. Each layer of rock, oil, gas or water has its own resonance so only a specific wave form will reflect off of it. These reflections are then gathered by the geophones and shipped to a (usually Houston) supercomputing facility where they do fiendishly complex processing to reverse engineer all of the bouncing and pinging the waves did so that they can create a layer cake map of the underlying rock strata and find the oil and gas. Pretty standard stuff, really.
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The Shovel Boy rock climbing six short weeks after the
events related here. Still 100% boy. |
As the youngest and lowest 'man' (for I was only notionally one, having none of the traditional secondary sexual characteristics associated with manhood) on the crew I was given a shovel and told to follow the 'Shooting' crew around as they set off the explosives. This was because from time to time some of the charges would 'blow out', meaning they would look like the explosions you see in war movies. I used the shovel to fill in the resulting craters, hence the name 'Shovel Boy' - although they rarely called me that, preferring 'hey you' or 'kid' - they loved hazing the 'boss's son.
My secondary job was to help hook up the charges. Typically they were spread over one- or two hundred meters and needed to be hooked up by wire to the Shooter's detonation device. The procedure was to hook up all of the charges then the Shooter would notify the Observer who was at a remote location inside the back of a truck filled with computing gear. The Observer would issue-and the Shooter would relay the warning "Get it Hot" and we would step away from the charges. The Observer then detonated the charges remotely. Sometimes one or more of the connections from the detonator to the charges would be faulty and the shooter would call out to us to go reset the connection. This was how I got blown up.
The first time I was blown up we were in a dense forest and I couldn't see or hear the Shooter well, I was having a hard time fixing the connection so when the Shooter yelled "hurry up kid" I yelled "I am" which he interpreted as 'I'm done', so rather than being clear of the blast zone, I was just standing up when the charge went off under my feet. It turns out that in those types of situations things really do seem to happen much slower for I recall having the time to think 'so this is what it's like to be blown up' before my back crashed into a nearby pine tree upon which all I could think was "ow". But I came out of that with nothing more than a deep and quite colorful bruise so it was all good.
The second time I was blown up was in a swamp/forest with waist deep water. So when the call went out to check the charge and the charge blew out while I was still nearby, I wasn't blown up. Instead a geyser of swamp mud and water shot in the air and with time once again moving slowly, I mused 'gee, that's going to land right on top of me' and then it did. I wasn't injured by the swamp stuff, it just splattered all over me but it came with a terrible side effect. It turns out that swamp mud that's been blown up has the consistency and smell of...well you know. And I was more or less covered in it. I spent the afternoon dry retching while vainly trying to wash smelly swamp mud off with smelly swamp water. When it came time to go back to the motel the guys made me ride in the back of the truck. We stopped at a 'magic wand' car wash where I stripped and was 'car washed'. Fun times.
So the more thoughtful of you may be wondering "gee Bill, why did you keep getting blown up?". Well it was really very simple. The Shooter and his Assistant had the civilized tradition of 'smoking a bowl' of home grown marijuana before shooting and during the lunch break. The usual scenario for us was to backpack all of our gear in country and then wait for the Observer and the rest of the crew to reset all of the geophones that had become dislodged or chewed on by wildlife the night before. This gave us an hour in the morning and half an hour at lunch to.....partake. You may also be musing "gee that was really stupid" and you'd be right. But fortunately for me I couldn't join my comrades because among my other wimpisms I had asthma and try as I might I always slipped into anaphylactic shock before I could get high. So ixNay on the opeDay. Which probably saved my life.
Right after this second 'incident' the crew took two weeks off - our normal pattern was to work seven days a week for five weeks straight and then go home for two. So I went home to my parents and told my father absolutely nothing about the dynamite dope fiends or being blown up. Why? For the same reason the military recruits 18 year old boys to charge machine gun nests. I very much wanted to be accepted as a peer by the men I was working with and to 'squeal' on them would have made my situation unbearable. Besides, I'd already been blown up twice and nothing particularly bad had happened - I could handle this.
Then the crew shifted from damp and swampy Vicksburg, MS to dry and gravelly Elk City, OK and the stakes became life and death. Two factors combined to make my job in western Oklahoma much more dangerous. The first was that the size of the individual charges was increased from about 5 to 20 pounds per hole (for comparison's sake the standard NATO 155mm (6 inch) artillery round contains 15.8 pounds of high explosive). Supposedly the holes were drilled much deeper to account for this difference but in the rocky high plains the drillers sometimes had difficulty doing so. The result was a lot of shallow charges and far more blowouts. And the second was when a hole blew, the result wasn't a nice WW2 movie crater or muddy shower, it was more akin to a shotgun or perhaps a Napoleonic cannon firing grapeshot. The geysers of small gravel and sand shot high into the air. And any part of your body that was over the blast zone would be shredded.
Being reasonably intelligent, it only took one blowout for me to realize that I wasn't in Kansas anymore (actually Kansas was just as bad but it's the conventional phrasing for this type of situational transition). I immediately began taking much more rigorous precautions. When the (stoned) Shooter told me to check a connection I would make him step several steps away from the detonator (he had to be holding the detonate button down for the Observer's detonation command to work) before I would go near the charge circuit. I really, really didn't want to be shredded. Needless to say this upset the two regular Shooters. They teased me, called me names and blamed me for delays but self preservation is a powerful motivator and I stuck to my guns. But still being an 18 year old boy, I didn't say anything to anyone else about why I was behaving this way.
The result was that the Crew Chief yanked me from the shooting crew, making me his miserable (but much safer) personal dog's body. My replacement as Shovel Boy was much older man, perhaps 24 who had just been hired. I met him at the weekly Sunday night barbecue that the Crew Chief catered. I remember telling myself when I shook his hand "I need to take him aside and warn him". But everyone was drinking (me included) and before long the hazing resumed. Now with a sharper edge: I was a coward who was afraid of things that go 'boom'. It's hard to describe just how painful this mockery was to me. I almost broke into tears. I had tried so hard to 'be a man' and now what was I? Nothing. And then I saw my replacement laughing at me with everyone else and thought "Well fuck you too".
The next day I still pretended that I was going to warn him but I really had no plans to do so. And after a few days I figured 'well he's obviously figured this out by now'. Then on that Thursday we got the call: "Man Down". The Crew Chief and I were the emergency response team and we got there in a couple minutes. It seems the new guy misunderstood a "Get it Hot" signal as a command to check the connection and the hole blew out while he was kneeling over it.
It blew his face off.
Well, not completely, there was still flesh clinging to his skull but it looked like gravelly hamburger. His eyes were like popped grapes. He was concussed and disoriented. We got him into the back of the truck and the crew chief - who had been in combat in Vietnam - told me "DO NOT let him screw with his face" while shoving a reluctant me in the back with him. This was when I reached my low point. Since then I have spent quite a bit of time reading combat memoirs, trying to understand how men respond to crisis situations and through that reading and this experience I have perceived what I suspect is a stock 'untruth'. Combat memoirs almost always share a story about the 'no hoper' wounded. The typical narrative is that the guy is in agony and can't be saved or begs to be killed because he has no legs and the murderous enemy are coming. I realize now that many of these are likely rather sanitized tales. I suspect what really happens is that frightened men, when confronted with a severely wounded comrade who they can't get to shut up, often choose to overdose him with morphine or barring that kill him outright due to fear and panic.
Why do I think this? Because my wounded replacement wouldn't shut up. He was in agony and he couldn't see so he kept moaning and trying to touch his face. Fortunately he was shock-ey and weak so even I was able keep his hands from scrabbling at his bloody mess. During the drive to the hospital it hit me just how badly I had betrayed him. The resulting shame made me even less compassionate. I wanted him to shut up in the worst way. I began by reasoning with him, then begging but ended up telling him in a low voice to "shut up, please shut up" until his moaning became whimpers.
There was an inquiry and my father flew in with the investigation team in a corporate jet. He immediately took me aside and asked me what had happened. I lied through my teeth. I 'didn't know', I 'wasn't there', I 'didn't have any problems when I was on that crew'. And it paid off. From that point on I was no longer a coward, no longer 'Daddy's little boy'. I was one of them, on their side. All I had to do was betray my own father and the horribly mutilated kid who replaced me.
And then came the most shameful part of the tragedy for me: I forgot it. I shoved my memory of it so far down, so deep into my subconscious that despite spending the last 18 months of my father's life caring for him every day, I didn't even remember the incident until he was dead (it was there but I had to want to remember it for it to surface and back then I didn't). I never confessed it to him. I never asked for his forgiveness. And the faceless stranger? I never knew his name. Never tried to look him up, much less confess and apologize to him.
Since last year when I allowed this memory to resurface, I have thought long and hard about the events of that hot summer. I have concluded that there are several kinds of coward and I'm one of them. I'm not a physical coward, in fact I'm kind of the opposite. Nor am I a social coward - if I'm in the mood I'll go up to anyone. What I am is a moral coward. When the chips are down and the right thing to do is obvious I will do it unless it costs me something socially or economically. Then my natural instinct is to side with my own self interest.
But there's a silver lining to my cowardice. In analyzing my sins, I realized that despite not even remembering what I'd done, God had used this experience in my life to change the way that I behaved. You see the key to living honorably if you're a moral coward is to take the moral stand up front. To announce your loyalty to the truth or honor or honest practice loudly before the chips are down and you are tempted to cheat. By doing so you trap yourself with the truth and make moral cowardice more costly to you than doing the right thing. It's really a form of jujitsu that I practice on myself - making the consequences of moral cowardice more painful than those of the truth.
And I didn't think of it at all, God somehow built it into my nature. Since then I've always been a bit of a 'turd in the punchbowl' - the critic who points out the flaw or the weakness or the questionable practice - never when the chips are down, mind you, but always when it was early and relatively cheap. When I was with the big and greedy consulting firm I would challenge powerful senior leaders on issues and my partners would come to me and ask me why. I always said something eloquent but the real answer was "I don't know", "I just had to". And to be honest it never really cost me much, in fact in most cases I ended up either ignored or even vindicated. Yet it wasn't some great moral undertaking or sacrifice, it's just what I was compelled to do.
So the bad news is that I'm still the moral coward who betrayed my own father. And always will be. But the good news is that God has built into me an imperfect but often effective habit of taking stands early, before they become costly and by doing so allowing me to better live up to the standard that I profess as a Christian. And crucially, he did it by taking one of the worst things I've ever done and using it without me even realizing what he was doing.
Jesus Christ said to us:
I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
John 15:5 English Standard Version (ESV)
I am living proof of the truth of that statement. And of the fact that no matter how cowardly we are, no matter how broken, it is
God who reaches down and changes
us.
