The Ankle Incidents Part #1
This is Steven Petrick Posting.
One of the jobs I held while in the service involved giving tours to high school students at the Air Assault School. As part of this we take them down and show them the obstacle course. For reasons of insurance, we cannot allow the students to run the obstacles (surprisingly, there are always a number of young males in any given group that want to be allowed to run the course, whether as a group any of them have any interest in the military or not). If the students seem to be getting along with the officer assigned to guide them around the post on their tour, I would sometimes race the officer over some of the obstacles (those least likely to soil our uniforms since the had to take the students elsewhere). These gets the students cheering for "their guy" as a sort of bonding experience to give them something to remember and talk about.
On this particular day the officer and I was racing across an obstacle requiring us to first scale troop ladders, go over the top, climb half way down to a horizontal ladder, walk across the Horizontal ladder, go over another beam onto another set of troop ladder that went from there half way to the ground, at which point you drop the rest of the way.
I (since I got to work on the obstacles myself quite often) had gained a lead as we went over the far beam. Then, I missed a rung with my left leg. This cost me my lead, and being somewhat competitive, I decided to regain it and beat the LT by simply stepping off and dropping three quarters (rather than half) the distance to the ground.
Really should have been no problem.
Really.
Except I landed on the deftly on my right foot, and my left ankle.
I swear I felt the ankle pop out of joint before the tightly laced combat boots force everything back to where it was supposed to be.
Before "the scream" could escape my lips I had my jaw clamped shut (must not upset the tourists). In an animated fashion I moved the tour group through the rest of the obstacles pretending nothing was wrong with my ankle, although I doubt I was completely successful in that, I think did convince them "the hurt is minor".
I got them back to their bus, answered a few questions, asked the what his next scheduled stop was (to get him to end the Q and A and board the bus), and told the medic to stand by.
I then stood there until the bus rolled over the hill, before falling against "The High Step Over" (the first obstacle on the course and instructing the medic to remove my boot and inspect my ankle.
I still have the cane from that incident.
One of the jobs I held while in the service involved giving tours to high school students at the Air Assault School. As part of this we take them down and show them the obstacle course. For reasons of insurance, we cannot allow the students to run the obstacles (surprisingly, there are always a number of young males in any given group that want to be allowed to run the course, whether as a group any of them have any interest in the military or not). If the students seem to be getting along with the officer assigned to guide them around the post on their tour, I would sometimes race the officer over some of the obstacles (those least likely to soil our uniforms since the had to take the students elsewhere). These gets the students cheering for "their guy" as a sort of bonding experience to give them something to remember and talk about.
On this particular day the officer and I was racing across an obstacle requiring us to first scale troop ladders, go over the top, climb half way down to a horizontal ladder, walk across the Horizontal ladder, go over another beam onto another set of troop ladder that went from there half way to the ground, at which point you drop the rest of the way.
I (since I got to work on the obstacles myself quite often) had gained a lead as we went over the far beam. Then, I missed a rung with my left leg. This cost me my lead, and being somewhat competitive, I decided to regain it and beat the LT by simply stepping off and dropping three quarters (rather than half) the distance to the ground.
Really should have been no problem.
Really.
Except I landed on the deftly on my right foot, and my left ankle.
I swear I felt the ankle pop out of joint before the tightly laced combat boots force everything back to where it was supposed to be.
Before "the scream" could escape my lips I had my jaw clamped shut (must not upset the tourists). In an animated fashion I moved the tour group through the rest of the obstacles pretending nothing was wrong with my ankle, although I doubt I was completely successful in that, I think did convince them "the hurt is minor".
I got them back to their bus, answered a few questions, asked the what his next scheduled stop was (to get him to end the Q and A and board the bus), and told the medic to stand by.
I then stood there until the bus rolled over the hill, before falling against "The High Step Over" (the first obstacle on the course and instructing the medic to remove my boot and inspect my ankle.
I still have the cane from that incident.
posted by Federation Commander at 11:10 PM
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