Pyro

A memory accosted me in the street yesterday. I threw a quick jab into the throat, but it swept the leg, Ralph Macchio style. I went down, my knees are not my strong suit, the poor little guys been through alot.

So anyway, this memory was of the time I was set on fire. I've been on fire a couple times, but this was more memorable.

So I was on the flight deck of the USS Constellation, a badass old heap of cold-rolled Bessemer joy if there ever was one, and I needed to make sure my machine could kill innocents and conscripts when an academy educated white man decided that was necessary. The flood of weakened sodium lights washed down on us in the cold, dark night in the Gulf. The machine was a hulk of titanium, boron, and aluminium. You would recognize one if you saw it, it is quite popular. The machine festoons itself with bulbous apparati along its sinewy flanks and under its flat belly that are there to take other machines and put them on heads or in buildings. Or on ships, though the US Navy isn't in the ship killing business anymore. The apparati need checked to ensure that salt and sand and the erosion of time have not rendered them unlethal. First you have to get electrical power to the machine.

Along the non-skid (a combination of epoxy and broken glass) surface of the deck, you'll notice holes. Or you won't and you'll fall in one. It is dark on a ship of war at night. The holes contain the large cables responsible for transferring power from the belly of the iron beast to the heart of the supersonic death machines resting on its back. I will spare you what useless trivia I can about this process.

In the bad old days, when naval aviation afforded you higher risks of maiming and death than being an infantryman in the Marines, we had to manually lock in the cables and power. Meaning you had to start the voltage, 800V worth, from ship and confirm with an electromagnetically held switch under the nose of the bird.

I had a friend named Trim. We had been months out at sea and had not heard from loved ones in a good, long time. When the earnest killing part of a war starts, the powers of good usually remove your ability to communicate off of a ship. I suspect that civilization would be a hobble if it was allowed to represent itself in the form of wives and mothers. Hand lifting of thousands of tons daily and lost sleep over our later confirmed suspicions of occurrences back home had frazzled us. Trim forgot to await my signal to start the voltage. As I rammed the plug home, an explosion of various high current DC and AC sparks shot around me. The sparks burned my hands singed my eyebrows. My shirt, as all red shirts with VF-(insert number) on the chest and back, was soaked in a cocktail of jet fuel, hyd fluid, and whatever other nitrate laden substance I had been playing with. So, the shit caught on fire.

I beat the flames off of me, and since the shirt itself is not flammable it was not difficult. Once the fire was out, the next rational thought I had was of home and Colorado and the girl that was waiting for me. Trim, still kneeling by the rat hole, caught a face full of steel toe. I think I choked him a little. We both left the flight deck bleeding and angry. We were still friends.


******


Unrelated update: If you thought bullshit blogosphere pretense and argumentative subject matter needed a home, it now has one. The Five.

Also, it is raining.