#Ten Thousand Miles in the Wrong Direction | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hlficlibrary · 2 months

Text

HL Fic Library 🩷 Meet Cute Fics

Remember to leave kudos and a comment on the fics you enjoyed to show your appreciation! You can find the library's other recs here.

🩷 You Make Lovin' Fun by @homosociallyyours {E, 109k}

Harry is a 28 year old travel writer at a gay magazine who gets the assignment to go a lesbian cruise. She figures it's a nice chance to have some fun in the sun, but she's not expecting much else-- even if her partner and best friend are both encouraging her to hook up with someone while she's there.

When she locks eyes with a gorgeous silver fox from across the room, she starts to think she could've been wrong. There are lots of things standing in the way of anything real happening with her and Louis, but that doesn't stop them from falling for one another. True love isn't always easy, but they do make lovin' fun.

🩷 Quiet People Have the Loudest Minds by @2tiedships2 {M, 38k}

Broadway shows were one of the few things that could keep Louis’ attention for a full two hours without needing to move about. But not tonight.

The alpha next to him was both infuriating him and practically turning him on at the same time. He needed to leave. The alpha, that is. Louis was staying.

Or the one where Louis is a nonverbal omega who has accepted the fact that he will never find an alpha that will treat him as an equal. On the other hand, he’s never met anyone like Harry.

🩷 hymns for restless stars by @turnyourankle {E, 37k}

Every Holiday season Louis has his pupils write down their Christmas wishes for class. He's read almost every wish under the sun, but one girl's wish takes him by surprise. It's for her uncle not to be alone anymore. It's not a wild wish by any means, but Louis had no idea that former teen idol Harry Styles was lonely in the first place.

🩷 From the Start by @allwaswell16 {E, 32k}

Louis has no idea that one act of kindness will cause his life to spiral out of control. But that's what happens when his new friend fake proposes to him and a video of it goes viral.

🩷 On This Winter's Night by @reminiscingintherain {T, 27k}

When a random bloke offers his lap for a seat on a busy bus in December, Louis' Christmas ends up being much different, and far less lonely than he was expecting.

🩷 What Side Of Love Are You On? by @fallinglikethis {T, 25k}

Ever since Harry finally made the decision to come out to his mother as bisexual, she’s been foisting women on him left and right, determined it’s just a phase. But when she puts out a personal ad to find the perfect partner for her son, things really get complicated. Suddenly, Harry’s heart is being pulled in two very different directions. On one side is the sweet, caring woman he has fun with, but doesn’t know his mother chose for him. On the other is a man who seems to be his mother’s worst nightmare, but makes Harry’s heart flutter in ways he’s never felt before. When all is said and done, maybe they’ll all learn that when there is no clear path to go down, the best option is to follow your heart.

A Because I Said So Au with a bisexual twist.

🩷 A Road To Something Better by @taggiecb {E, 25k}

Louis Tomlinson, famous romance novelist, has just had the rug pulled out from under his feet when his boyfriend leaves him without notice. What's the most appropriate response to this? Move a thousand miles away and seclude himself in a tiny lake town, of course. But nothing is as he expects it to be in the very best way, especially not the handsome mayor of McAll, Idaho.

🩷 Naked & Proud by kiwikero / @icanhazzalou {E, 18k}

The town itself is tiny, as evidenced by the ten minutes it’s taken Louis to drive the entire thing. There’s not a single recognisable brand in sight—no Tesco or McDonald’s or even a bloody Starbucks. Lining the streets instead are mom and pop stores with names like ‘Jerry’s Burgers’ and ‘The Market Basket’ and…

“'Naked & Proud?'” Louis almost slams on the brakes at the outlandish sign, the name written in a seemingly innocent font, words curved around a large cartoon peach. He can’t help turning into the carpark, easing the car into a spot next to a beat up truck.

He isn’t sure what to make of it. Surely it isn’t a strip joint or sex shop, not with the families and little old ladies going in and out of the establishment. Some kind of nudist hangout, perhaps?

And, oh, God. Did Louis’ mother accidentally send him to live in a nudist colony?

In which Harry runs an organic store, not a nudist colony, and Louis doesn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

🩷 Single Bells Ring by nonsensedarling / @absoloutenonsense {M, 16k}

A holiday singles event is not where Louis wants to be tonight, but there he is, helping his best friend find love. Just as Louis is settling in, ready to have a terrible time, he meets the fittest alpha he’s ever come across.

🩷 love so soft, you ain’t had nothing softer (series) by @neondiamond {E, 15k}

Louis is an Alpha with an odd obsession for gummy bears. Harry is an Omega who makes friends a little too easily. They meet on the bus.

🩷 Breathe me in, breathe me out by @lunarheslwt {G, 14k}

Louis was just passing the autumn collection, when an unfamiliar but addicting scent tickled his nose. Cinnamon. He turned as he realised something. He felt calm. Relaxed. The permanent agitation that he carried was melting away the more he breathed in the scent, as faint as it was. Consumed by the crazed desire to seek out the specific candle, Louis began picking up candles and sniffing them madly, when a deep voice piped up, startling him. “Uh, sir, we don’t allow candle fetishists in here.” Louis froze mid sniff in mortification. Willing himself to not blush, he turned, a retort at the tip of his tongue. Except, it died in his throat as he took in the man before him. “I uh,” Louis blurted out accidentally, temporarily rendered speechless by the frankly unfairly beautiful man before him. Only at the man’s grin widening did he regain his wits. “You’re gonna kink shame me?”

Or, Louis is drawn into a quaint candle shop in his desire to find ways to soothe himself while struggling with touch depri. It takes him two more run-ins and with the lovely alpha sales assistant, and a drop, to figure out the source of the scent that imprints upon him and calms his omega. Idiots to lovers

🩷 Far Afield by QuickedWeen / @becomeawendybird {T, 11k}

Harry Styles is a witch who owns the best flower shop in Manchester. Lottie Tomlinson is planning her wedding, and brings her brother along to her first appointment. Both men have been having a bad day and sparks fly.

🩷 The Art of the Giants by asphodelknox / @iamasphodelknox {G, 10k}

Louis is dancing away from an old relationship when he meets Harry at a bookstore in the busy streets of Seattle. Harry is just a bookstore owner hoping his handsome weekly visitor could become something more.

🩷 All Shook Up by @littleroverlouis {T, 9k}

Memphis, Tennessee is looking to crown the Ultimate Elvis Tribute artist. A majority of the contestants are content to shake their hips on stage, but singer-songwriter Harry is taking it more seriously. He is confident his voice and charisma will send him straight through to the finals.

He is already polishing his crown before even setting foot on stage, until he meets a fellow competitor. Louis is talented, charming, and a natural born performer. He commands the stage— and Harry's attention.

Harry has his eye on the prize and the Ultimate title, but what happens when someone becomes the ultimate prize?

🩷 The Way to My Heart by LadyAJ_13 / @ladyaj-13 {T, 6k}

Louis' having a bit of a dry spell, until he bumps into an attractive alpha in the supermarket and leaves with his number. It was a hard bump. Very... muscular.

The only problem is, said alpha asks Louis to cook for him - which is not exactly his skill set.

🩷 Only Reason by @letsjustsee {NR, 5k}

“We are so lucky to have with us one of the leading experts on beekeeping in the modern age, Dr. Louis Draper.” No. No, no, no… “I know I speak for many of us when I say that this man’s books have guided our practice, or helped us get started,” Harry continued, and Louis watched as the crowd nodded their heads in agreement. Oh shit. No. What? No. But then Harry was gesturing towards him, saying “Dr. Draper?” into the microphone, the crowd was applauding, and Louis found himself walking up the stairs to the stage.

Or, Louis is most definitely smitten with Harry from the second he sees him, but he is also most definitely not the world's foremost expert on beekeeping. He decides to roll with it anyway.

🩷 Unplant by @hellolovers13 {M, 4k}

Please do not disturb my plant She needs 2 hours of sunlight a day and I live in a sunless flat I’ll be back to collect her soon Thank you and stay well.

or Louis should've looked where he was going, then he wouldn't have to desperately try to save a little flower now.

🩷 Validation by @lululawrence {NR, 3k}

“Hey, how are you?” Harry asked. He’d found that sometimes just a smile and a kind face was all that was needed to brighten someone’s day.

“Oh, uhm. I’m alright. Can you validate me?”

Harry chuckled inwardly, but decided to go ahead and take him literally.

Or the one where Harry worked in a parking garage and he totally didn’t mean for this, the whole validation of people as well as their parking tickets, to become a thing. It just kinda...did.

🩷 more than that by @nouies {NR, 3k}

Harry looks for the best bread in France. He finds Louis.

🩷 an honest mistake by @disgruntledkittenface {NR, 2k}

“You look different when you’re not covered in come,” he blurts out, immediately regretting each and every life choice that has led to this exact moment. Elevator Guy is going to hate him.

Louis has ridden the elevator with his neighbor all week. The first time they speak, there’s a misunderstanding.

147 notes · View notes

gamersansblog · 1 year

Text

Chapter 1

The change

Summary: How the world changed

Warning: cursing,mention of gore, gore, killing and mention of killing, death

Tags:

******

Kaiju (kaigū, Japanese) Giant Beast

Jaeger (Jā'gar, German) Hunter

"When I was a kid whenever I feel small or lonely I look up the stars." "wondered if there was life up there....turns out I was looking at the wrong direction"

"When Allen life entered our world it was deep beneath the pacific ocean...a fisher of two tectonic plates a portal between dimensions"

Thr deep of the pacific ocean with blue lightning as it flames erupted flames also erupting making a portal of the other world

"The breach.... I was 15 when the first kaiju made land in San Francisco"

A monster bigger then the a bridge roars loudly while destroying a bridge with people in their cars still.

Fighter jets zoom across the bridge and starts shooting shooting the monster called a kaiju.

One the fighter jets crashed at the claws of the kaiju and exploded.

"By the time tanks, jets, and missles took it down 6 days and 35 miles later. 3 cities were destroyed. Tens and thousands of lives were lost"

The blaring of the alarm and loud screams of people while running around trying to find cover.

Workers are walking up a hill where the kaiju destroyed and up to where the kaiju was laying dead

"We morned their death and memorialized the attack and moved on..."

Obama is talking about we will stand united against this threat.

Graves are shown of how many people died during the kaiju attack.

people screaming and running away while a different kaiju rose showing its face. The building being destroyed by the kaiju.

"Then only six months later the second attack hit Manila"

A foot foot of a kaiju beast showed on the news then people using exilators to pick up the remains of the kaiju or the remains of the attack.

"After factor of the kaiju blood creates a toxic phenomenon called kaiju blue" the reporter said ot the screen shows a man sticking out his hend showing the kaiju blood that was dark blue

"Then the third one hit Carbo. Then the fourth then we learned this was not going to stop this was just the beginning"

The boat was slowly drifting somewhere as it carries a skeleton kaiju with guts next to it. People holding hands as they watch the flames and smoke erupt after the kaiju attack.

Flames everywhere as a kaiju screeches.

"We needed a new weapon.....The world came together, pooling its resources and throwing aside old rivalries"

Presidents pooling put their information so they can make a machine to destroy any kaiju that come put of the breach.

Robots melting and working on metal.

The metal that is a chest plate slowly lowers down to connect to the other pieces.

"For the sake of the greater good" "To fight monsters, we created monsters of pur own"

A women engineer is working on wiring whole talking to someone...

Half of a metal body is standing while workers work on it including the other one

"The yeager program was born"

A man raises his head wearing a helmet like thing.

Another man is waring a arm that has wires and holds the arm out and squeezes his hand while another hand I the background copies him.

"There were setbacks at first... The neural laid to interface with a yeager proved to much for a single pilot..."

Men are draging a man to a seat and set him down while the man. The man seat looked dazed. Doctors lowered his eye while shining a light showing slight blood in his eye while his nose suddenly started bleeding.

"A two-pilot system was implemented. Left Hemisphere, Right Hemisphere pilot control."

"We started winning. Jeagers stopping Kaijus everywhere. But the jaegers were only good as their pilots."

Soilders where marching while confedie and loud cheer while a Jaeger was being pulled.

A jaeger taking down a kaiju.

"So jaeger pilots turned into Rockstars danger turned into a propaganda. Kaijus into toys."

"We got really good at it... Winning"

"Then.......them it all changed..."

#male reader #male reader insert #call of duty modern warfare #cod x male reader #cod x reader #gay #pacific rim x call of duty #pacific rim x call of duty crossover #pacific rim x reader #pacific rim x male reader

128 notes · View notes

argyrocratie · 1 year

Text

Two stories of the russian revolution where John Reed and Nestor Makhno recount how they nearly got killed by their own side over a misunderstanding

- - -

-John Reed from “Ten Days That Shook the World”:

The truck hurtled on toward Romanov, through the bright, empty day. At the first cross-roads two soldiers ran out in front of us, waving their rifles. We slowed down, and stopped.

“Passes, comrades!”

The Red Guards raised a great clamour. “We are Red Guards. We don’t need any passes…. Go on, never mind them!”

But a sailor objected. “This is wrong, comrades. We must have revolutionary discipline. Suppose some counterrevolutionaries came along in a truck and said: We don’t need any passes?’ The comrades don’t know you.”

At this there was a debate. One by one, however, the sailors and soldiers joined with the first. Grumbling, each Red Guard produced his dirty bumaga (paper). All were alike except mine, which had been issued by the Revolutionary Staff at Smolny. The sentries declared that I must go with them. The Red Guards objected strenuously, but the sailor who had spoken first insisted. “This comrade we know to be a true comrade,” he said. “But there are orders of the Committee, and these orders must be obeyed. That is revolutionary discipline...”

In order not to make any trouble, I got down from the truck, and watched it disappear careening down the road, all the company waving farewell. The soldiers consulted in low tones for a moment, and then led me to a wall, against which they placed me. It flashed upon me suddenly; they were going to shoot me!

In all three directions not a human being was in sight. The only sign of life was smoke from the chimney of a datchya, a rambling wooden house a quarter of a mile up the side road. The two soldiers were walking out into the road. Desperately I ran after them. “But comrades! See! Here is the seal of the Military Revolutionary Committee!”

They stared stupidly at my pass, then at each other.

“It is different from the others,” said one, sullenly. “We cannot read, brother.”

I took him by the arm. “Come!” I said. “Let’s go to that house. Some one there can surely read.” They hesitated. “No,” said one. The other looked me over. “Why not?” he muttered. “After all, it is a serious crime to kill an innocent man.”

We walked up to the front door of the house and knocked. A short, stout woman opened it, and shrank back in alarm, babbling, “I don’t know anything about them! I don’t know anything about them!” One of my guards held out the pass. She screamed. “Just to read it, comrade.” Hesitatingly she took the paper and read aloud, swiftly:

“The bearer of this pass, John Reed, is a representative of the American Social-Democracy, an internationalist...”

Out on the road again the two soldiers held another consultation. “We must take you to the Regimental Committee,” they said. In the fast-deepening twilight we trudged along the muddy road. Occasionally we met squads of soldiers, who stopped and surrounded me with looks of menace, handling my pass around and arguing violently as to whether or not I should be killed...

It was dark when we came to the barracks of the Second Tsarskoye Selo Rifles, low sprawling buildings huddled along the post-road. A number of soldiers slouching at the entrance asked eager questions. A spy? A provocator? We mounted a winding stair and emerged into a great, bare room with a huge stove in the centre, and rows of cots on the floor, where about a thousand soldiers were playing cards, talking, singing, and asleep. In the roof was a jagged hole made by Kerensky’s cannon..

I stood in the doorway, and a sudden silence ran among the groups,who turned and stared at me. Of a sudden they began to move, slowly and then with a rush, thundering, with faces full of hate. “Comrades! Comrades!” yelled one of my guards. “Committee! Committee!” The throng halted, banked around me, muttering. Out of them shouldered a lean youth, wearing a red arm-band.

“Who is this?” he asked roughly. The guards explained. “Give me the paper!” He read it carefully, glancing at me with keen eyes. Then he smiled and handed me the pass. “Comrades, this is an American comrade. I am Chairman of the Committee, and I welcome you to the Regiment...” A sudden general buzz grew into a roar of greeting, and they pressed forward to shake my hand.

“You have not dined? Here we have had our dinner. You shall go to the Officers’ Club, where there are some who speak your language...”

- - -

-Nestor Makhno from “L’insurection paysanne révolutionnaire”:

Without suspecting a thing, I continued to visit my various relatives at night, thus aggravating the suspicions which now spread to the rest of the village. I didn't know that for a while and everywhere my relatives were questioned about me.

One evening, having pooled money together to buy beer and homemade vodka, the youths of the village organized a party not far from where I was staying, resolved to seize me during the night to go and kill me in the fields. and bury my body there. They unearthed the revolvers, sawed-off shotguns and sabers they had hidden during the spring events and looked forward to evening.

Among them was my cousin's son, my own nephew, who knew nothing about that plan. The drinks helping, the conspirators began to question him about me and asked him to introduce me to them, supposedly so that we could get to know each other. My nephew dithered as long as he could, then decided to come get me.

The invitation seemed opportune to me, because not being able to go back home, I had decided to organize an insurrectionary vanguard from here. The party was happening across the street, in a large shed, with a large low table in the middle. The youths were seated around it and, to the side, gypsy-style, on a tarpaulin on the ground, were older peasants. The first drank and sang peasant songs. The latter played arba, a very popular card game in Ukraine during the long winter evenings. At my appearance in the shed some rejoiced and others were disturbed. I noticed it, without guessing why. Suddenly, as darkness descended on the shed, one of the older ones shouted, "Guys, give the newcomer some beer!" I had nothing against it, but feeling a tension rising around me of which I did not know the cause, I preferred to refuse. I was then asked to sit down to join in the game. Refusing again, i retorqued in brief and straightforward terms that the peasants and workers had better things to do in the circumstances than to play cards.

The youngsters pricked up their ears, the older ones elbowed each other knowingly, winking and giggling. I didn't pay much attention to it. My speech became more and more militant. I planned to form with these young people a first circle, then to select the most ardent to form an insurrectionary combat group. Focusing on what i was saying, I did not notice that the young people were listening to me with increasing attention, that the others, having left their cards and stopped their stupid giggles, had risen and turned to me with their mouths agape. When I denounced at the end the criminal bands of the Austro-German junkers and the hetman, the bloody reaction carried out against the workers and above all against the peasants, when I enumerated their cruelties towards those who had dared to expropriate the pomeshchiks and the kulaks, and whose corpses were now swinging from telegraph poles, how men were shot in front of women and children to spread terror among the population, the youths, unable to stand it any longer, got up shouting: "Here we only know how to play cards!” The older ones retorqued: "We old fools only know how to play cards, it's true, but yourself, you prefer to get drunk..."

Their voices mixed and they ended up all approaching me, without consulting each other, in turn, smiling at me in silence or speaking in an emotional voice, to shake my hand. Then two of them came closer to me and turned to their companions: "Comrades," they said, "it appears that the comrade here is not who we thought he was and we must tell him." "That's true, that's right" agreed the others.

Then the two men, Korobka and A. Ermokratiev, led me to a corner of the shed where they cleared a pile of clothes. I saw the sawed-off shotguns, revolvers, sabers and bayonets. "This is the armament we have left over from our participation this spring in the Red Guards. These weapons were to be used against you, comrade, because we took you for a spy. We had decided to kidnap you last night, to cut you into pieces to make you talk, then to finish you off and bury you in a field. »

I listened to them calmly at first but could not contain myself for long: a shiver ran through my body, the heat rose to my head. For a minute or two, I remained shaken, then getting back control over myself, I asked them, "How could I attract such suspicion?" They just replied, "Now that we've heard your speech, we don't have any suspicions. We only regret that your relatives were stupid enough to hide the truth from us. It was a close call tonight comrade.” A nervous wreck, I wanted to go back to my dwelling. The ringleaders insisted on escorting me to my door and apologized for their mistake.

#russian revolution #nestor makhno #john reed #anarchism #communism #long post

126 notes · View notes

japhan2024 · 5 months

Note

Ian's Day: Ian and Anthony going on holiday together and being generally adorable?

Oh yes, and they definitely will go on holiday together. I feel it in my SPLEEN! Anyway,

Walnut Grove

Words: 1.397

Genre: general, a bit of fluff

Ian drove. Anthony was trying to make sense of a huge paper road map, spread all over the dashboard. He giggled.

"I'm so clueless and directionally challenged, we're so going to end up in a weird fucked up place!"

"Anthony, we are on holiday. There are no wrong turns. Just... adventure! Ian cracked a sideways smile at Anthony, who accepted the reassurance and sighed happily.

"No work, no social media, no phones! What a life!"

"Truly."

"I did a thing like this with a group of influencers a few years back. I thought I would go insane, it was so bad. But with you, it actually feels good, natural."

"You went on a group holiday with influencers?" Ian jokingly scrunched his nose and brows like Anthony had said something gross.

"Yeah, I did that."

"Hey, I'm just teasing ya. I actually feel the same. This is so nice." He sighed as well. "No frickin' avalanche of information directed at you at all times. And, haha, no corporate emails!!"

"No corporate emails!! Hell yes. It's like we're teenagers again."

"Ha! No teen has a beard as sick as mine!"

"True, or tens of thousands of dollars worth of tattoos."

"Geez, were they that expensive?"

"If you add everything up, yeah, they were."

"Well, Anthony, I think they add something unique to you, nobody has something like that. And I love that for you."

"Thanks! Oh, in a few miles, turn right."

"Thanks, buddy."

The land stretched seemingly endlessly around their rented Ford Mustang. It was clear blue skies, yellow grass and black trees to infinity. Hours passed and the sun began to set, when they approached their destination. The scenery had slightly changed, like minimal music, to include more and alive trees under a clear but darkening sky.

"Okay, the map says we have to take a left in a few miles, I can barely see anymore in this twilight. Let's hope we get there alright!"

Ian chuckled. "Imagine we get lost and run out of fuel, and have to just sleep on the side of the road."

"That sounds like the start of a horror movie!"

"Yeah, let's hope it doesn't come to that."

Sure enough, a large roadside billboard appeared with a big arrow pointing left. Green on white letters said 'Walnut Grove Resort'.

"Yes! We've made it!" Anthony yelled excitedly. They drove up a rickety driveway, along all kinds of holiday cabins. Rarely any had the lights on inside.

"Ours is number 31.."

They squinted through the dark, but finally, they found their house. It was right by a lake. Ian parked, and they jumped out of the car.

"This is awesome!"

Ian got a little key out of an envelope and they got into their house. It was very roomy and probably had an excellent view of the water and the forest that surrounded it. But it was so dark outside that they couldn't see anything.

Anthony walked around. "Wow, look at this room, look at the wooden walls, the high ceiling, the..."

"Fireplace!!" Ian jumped and made a victorious gesture, he walked to the fireplace and started to put blocks of wood into it, starting a fire. Anthony walked around some more. There was a huge bedroom with two beds and an en suite bathroom. There even was a second bedroom and another separate toilet. The kitchen was a bit old timey but large and when he opened the fridge, he saw it was fully stacked, just like they had ordered. Anthony did a little happy dance. Walking back into the living room, the fire was already crackling and Ian had taken seat on an incredibly comfortable looking fauteuil. Anthony lay down on the couch.

"You know what's funny?" Anthony asked.

"What?"

"If we would have our phones with us, we'd be scrolling right now! We wouldn't be able to truly enjoy this amazing house or even our holiday because we would be semi-working again!"

'You're so right. You know, everyone worries about AI taking over the world, but what part of people's lives isn't dictated by an algorhitm COMPLETELY, already right now?"

"I hadn't even thought of that. That's crazy."

"This fireplace is so fucking dope."

"I feel SO relaxed!"

"Yeah, me too, I'm already recovered from driving so long. I'm just chilling now."

They sat and lay about for a couple of hours just like that, and as the fire finally went out, Anthony stood up from the couch.

"Ian?"

"Yeah?"

"Let's go on a hike!"

"Bro, it's the middle of the night!"

"Yeah, dude! Dude... we might see her!" Anthony said this so suggestively that Ian laughed out loud."

"Who?"

"The Milky Way!"

"Is that a she?"

"Oh for sure. And she's gorgeous. I've never seen her in person yet though. It's been a life long dream."

"Well, how can I refuse that! Let's go live your dream, Anthony!"

They went outside where it was pitch-black. Anthony brought a flashlight but it only cast a small light on the path before them. They strolled along the path of the resort, alongside the lake. Then the road led out of the park and into the woods.

"I mean, this might be the end of us, Anthony. 'Last seen near their holiday home, Ian and Anthony mysteriously disappeared!' It's SO dark oh my god!"

"My eyes are adjusting to the dark though, are yours? I can see without the flashlight now. I even begin to see some stars!"

"No, don't put it out.. okay fine. But let's keep close?"

The genuine panic in Ian's voice melted Anthony's heart. He grabbed Ian's hand and they walked into the forest. And as they walked and it got even darker under the trees, the clear sky above showed the unfathomably large amount of stars there. The moon was only a sickle so that wasn't helping much. They continued, Anthony more and more enthusiastic, Ian cracking jokes to keep from being terrified.

"Wait! Anthony?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you see that?"

"Huh? Oh!"

There was a board with an arrow pointing left and on it stood 'Firewatch'.

"Ian, we HAVE to go. We will have the most epic view imaginable."

"Alright, but only because it's you. And after that I want to head back home okay? I mean to our holiday home, not actually home, we just got there..." Ian's voice trailed off. They were still holding hands and Anthony was rubbing his thumb on Ian's hand.

"I promise, okay?"

"Okay."

The turn left proved to be a less accessible path than they had thought and they slowed down quite a bit, having to let go and walk behind each other. But at long last, they reached the base of the watchtower.

"Are you sure we are allowed to go up at night?"

"It's not like we're vandals or something. We just want to see the view. Come on!"

They walked up the croaky metal staircase and Ian somehow found his courage again. "This is so cool," he said with a smile. Anthony smiled even wider.

When they reached the top, Anthony's idea proved to be literally stellar. The sky was filled to the brim with stars. They saw Ursa Major, Andromeda... they didn't know a lot of constellations after that but they still looked, in wonder, to the night sky they never ever saw in Los Angeles. They decided to sit down for a while.

"This is beautiful," Anthony said softly.

"Absolutely. Nature is crazy like that."

"Ian."

"Yeah?"

"I see her!"

"Oh shit you're right! Wow, look at that."

There, up among all the stars, was a large area that was extra bright. Like a path across the sky.

"It makes you feel so small, but in a good way, if you know what I mean," Ian said.

"Yeah. We're just insignificant specks in the universe. And yet, our lives are full of meaning. So just imagine, the amount of meaning and stories, and feelings, here in America, across the world, maybe even somewhere out there."

"Do you still believe in aliens?"

"Yeah, sure! If we're here, why wouldn't there be other planets like this?"

"If you say so, Anthony."

They sat there for quite some time before they headed back home. This promised to be one of their most unique and special holidays to date.

#ian's day #fanfic #ianthony #fluff #ian day

13 notes · View notes

sunboki · 2 years

Text

hwang hyunjin didn’t intend to. if anything he simply wanted to drop by and annoy minho as much as he possibly could before leaving. especially visiting his home left with all these openings for teasing or something petty hyunjin liked to pick at. that was, apart from your presence of course. in finale, he fully didn’t intend to fall for you. ‘no, wait. not fall—to.. become interested in. that’s all.’ is what he reassured himself earlier that day, but now he knew just how pitiful this stuttering heart of his was.

standing at the doorway of the minho family home, his anxiously tapping foot was awkwardly evident no matter how you looked at it. it’d been years that he’d known lee know but only a few weeks since he’d met you, lee know’s sister and even with that time barrier, his feet couldn’t stop themselves from running to you.

“come in?” lee know tilted his head, a bit curious considering hyunjin’s unusual behavior. after all, the anticipation for the grand entrance from the once prideful companion cut short in such an abrupt manner, currently scuttling around like a nervous child.

stepping aside to allow the fritzy-ferret entryway, he took note of the slumped shoulders and the sigh of relief.

“what? expecting a welcome party?” minho joked lightly, cocking a brow—his lips tugging upwards—lee know like.

“i was, now i’m disappointed.” crossing his arms to his chest in false disapproval, hyunjin puffed his lips dramatically. luckily for him, the atmosphere’s temporary film of tension washed away rapidly, paving way for more irritating banter between the two hot-headed boys.

“what’re you two talking about? i can hear you from my room.” you frowned, head leering over the stairwell. right then and there his heart stopped. just like that. absolutely stilled.

“ah nothin’,” lee know hushed, beckoning your downstairs to watch a newly released show. ‘luckily’ was not the word to describe his life right now. silently cursing the vocalist under his breath while he was dragged into watching the series. you, him, and your brother. how comfortable. perfect. so. very. perfect. the best part? you were seated right beside him, attempting small talk languidly without a care. meanwhile his mind was running ten thousand miles per hour simply talking to you. your voice your lips your practically sparkling eyes were far too enamoring for him. captivating him in every way.

eventually, the action in the episode died down, loads of talking and filler taking over. lee know then occupied himself with his phone, hyunjin stuck next to you who insisted to keep watching. of course he agreed to do so—there was genuinely no way to say no to you. long silence spread across the room and you’d become quiet, sparing a hasty glance in your direction he noticed how dazed your stare had fallen—head suddenly alerting a a soft thud on his shoulder.

‘luckily.’ maybe that was in fact a good word to describe the feeling spreading so infectious throughout his limbs. you looked so peaceful as you slept. cute. maybe it was wrong to have a crush on his friends sister, but right now in this moment he couldn’t care less. the show’s chattering buzzing into nothing short of white noise. a strand of hair sweeping to rest crooked upon your lashes. breathtaking wasn’t good enough. he guaranteed he’d never been this gentle in his life, gingerly dusting the stray piece from your face.

“you’re so beautiful…” he mumbled—admiring you in these tender seconds whilst ensuring the blanket was covering your body securely.

‘i want you to be mine.. but i’ll wait angel—until you want me to be yours.’

one day.

thank you for reading <3

@faulix — reposting, editing, plagiarism, etc is not allowed

#hwang hyunjin #hyunjin x reader #hwang hyunjin x reader #hwang hyunjin x you #hyunjin x you #hyunjin x y/n #skz x reader #stray kids #stray kids fluff #stray kids x reader #stray kids x y/n #skz fluff #hyunjin fluff #hwang hyunjin fluff

91 notes · View notes

liebgotts-lovergirl · 2 years

Text

Fire On Fire: Chapter 6

(Ch. 5) (Ch. 4) (Ch. 3) (Ch. 2) (Ch. 1)

Gallery II Taglist Application II Symbol Guide

Summary: Years of preparation have led up to this moment: D-Day is here.

Contemporary: June 4th, 1944. Upottery Airfield, England.

Waking up next to Joe was heaven but the day itself was far from it.

Alix's assumption had been correct: the original plan was to jump on the 4th but the powers that be (also known as General Eisenhower) deemed the heavy cloud cover, fog, and strong winds too risky so at the very last minute, a 24-hour stand-down was ordered.

Everyone was understandably peeved: all that preparation and psyching yourself up mentally, just to have the metaphorical brakes slammed on right before takeoff.

But although she’d never admit it out loud, Alix was honestly relieved. As much as part of her wanted to just get the damn drop over with, another part was grateful for the small delay.

She’d take as much time as she could get without people trying to kill her and her friends.

As she settled in between Joe and Malarkey to watch Mr. Lucky for what felt like the millionth time, Alix couldn’t help but feel a twinge of grief: Gio would’ve loved this film.

Her older brother, Giovanni, had been the world’s biggest Cary Grant fan and every time he had shore leave, he'd drag Alix to the movies with him to see the latest picture starring his favorite actor.

She'd seen Suspicion and His Girl Friday so many times when she'd visited that she swore she could recite them backwards, line by line.

But Gio would just roll his eyes at her half-hearted complaints.

“Mom made me sit through years of your God-awful piano recitals,” he'd remind her as they stood in line at the box office. “You owe me."

"That's not fair," Alix would protest as they collected their tickets and made their way into the lobby. "I quit piano like ten years ago!"

"And thank God for that," he would joke, earning him a smack on the arm from his younger sister.

"What you did to Moonlight Sonata should be considered a crime!"

Now 23, Alix's heart sank at the faint echoes of Gio's breezy laugh in her mind.

She could feel it slowly slipping from her memory, every day a little more. She was forgetting him slowly and she hated herself for it.

Gio hadn't been seen for 3 years, not since the attack on Pearl Harbor. The ship he'd been serving on, the Arizona, had been completely destroyed in the bombing and Giovanni had been one of many classified as MIA.

For the first year or so, Alix and her family held out hope that perhaps he'd survived somehow. But eventually, her mother told Penny to stop setting an extra place at the table and Alix knew.

No one spoke about it. Her father found refuge in women and booze. Her mother found refuge at mass and in her garden.

And Alix…Alix was the same age as Gio had been when he disappeared, and she was over three thousand miles away just like him, about to throw herself into a fucking war zone.

Sensing something was wrong, Joe leaned his shoulder slightly against her own like a worried puppy, just enough to say “I’m here if you need me” without actually saying a word.

She didn't say anything but aimed a small, grateful smile in his direction anyway so he knew she understood.

After checking around them to be sure no one was paying attention, Alix reached over and slipped her hand into Joe's, giving it a quick squeeze.

I love you.

His lips curved into a warm smile and he squeezed her hand back, eyes still trained on the film.

I love you too.

∆∆━━━━∆∆━━━━━∆∆━━━━∆∆

Contemporary: June 5th, 1944. Upottery Airfield, England.

The following day seemed to crawl by at a snail's pace and having Lewis Nixon breathing down her neck wasn’t helping.

Alix had already spent her morning poring over her forged passports and IDs for any possible mistakes. One wrong letter, one misplaced stamp, and she could be found out. She was nervous enough as it was without Lieutenant Nixon pacing behind her like a mother hen, peppering her with questions she'd already answered.

“What about your radio?”

Even with the cam cream smeared strategically on his face, Alix could still see the frown lines creasing his brow.

“You do have your radio, right?”

“Yes sir,” the young agent reminded him, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice.

He'd already asked that twice.

“Everything’s either in here tucked under the First Aid supplies—"

She patted the worn canvas messenger bag hanging off her shoulder, the red cross emblazoned on it falsely identifying her as a combat nurse.

"— or here," she gestured to her shirt.

Everyone knew that the Nazis found it morally degenerate to strip-search women, a fact which Swallows and now Sparrows relied on to carry out their missions.

Important documents and her L-Pill, also known as the lethal cyanide pill, were pinned to the underside of her bra for safe-keeping.

“Good,” Nixon affirmed gruffly and Alix was suddenly reminded why people below him called him Blackbeard behind his back. “And you know your orders, correct, Agent?”

“Yes sir,” Alix replied, repeating them back to him in a voice much more confident than she felt:

“Get to the nearest available shelter, radio in, if possible. Rendezvous with our French assets, gather intel, sniff out the mole. Then once he or she is taken care of, we move to phase 2: Bang & Burn. I radio in and we go from there.”

More formally known as a demolition and sabotage operation, the Bang & Burn would be the easy part. Now finding the mole…that could be troublesome.

Alix knew her instincts were good but still, she worried:

Were they good enough? What if she killed the wrong person?

As if he could hear her thoughts, Lieutenant Nixon gave her a grudging nod, the first sign of approval she’d ever gotten from him.

He hesitated and for a split second, she thought her case officer might actually say something nice for a change but he seemed to think better of it. Instead, he just gave her another, more final nod before stalking off, most likely to find Colonel Strayer to compare notes.

Taking a deep breath as she tried to calm her nerves, Alix felt around her bulky uniform for the fiftieth time, double-checking every piece of equipment, no matter how small. Everything from her leg bag to her pistol would be vital in the coming hours.

∆∆━━━━∆∆━━━━━∆∆━━━━∆∆

Alix had always hated flying and this time was no different. The cacophonous rattling of the metal, the roaring of the engines, the howling wind just outside, she could barely hear herself think and knowing how dangerously high up they were did nothing for her nerves.

The air sickness pills were starting to make her woozy and she almost cracked a smile at the memory of what Skip– who was now snoring soundly to her left– had said hours earlier when they were first given the pills.

"Can't be airsick if we're not awake, can we?" he'd piped up with his trademark grin as he popped a pill in his mouth.

Now, leaning forward a bit, Alix peered around the sleeping Skip to check on Don. He was just barely awake, staring blankly in front of him into the darkness with his lips pressed together in a thin line. Hands clasped in front of him, he looked about as anxious as she felt.

Feeling her eyes on him, Don glanced over to her and Alix mustered up a shaky half-smile.

We're gonna be okay.

Her best friend tried to return the expression but only succeeded in a small grimace, his apprehensive-looking brown eyes silently voicing her own fears:

Are we?

Alix squeezed her eyes shut so he wouldn't be able to see the rising panic she knew was there.

She couldn't afford to show her fear, not now, not even to her best friends.

But even still, she was terrified.

Sandwiched between her two best friends and her boyfriend, she took a couple deep breaths before slouching down in her seat, her head dropping as she allowed the drowsiness from the pills to take over.

∆∆━━━━∆∆━━━━━∆∆━━━━∆∆

Alix surfaced from sleep hours later to find she’d spent most of her night accidentally slumped over onto Joe’s shoulder.

Lifting her head, the young spy forced herself to sit up groggily, hoping no one had noticed.

Luckily, everyone else seemed to still be asleep, except Lieutenant Winters who was gazing out the door into the night and her boyfriend Joe, who gave her an encouraging wink that somehow made her cheeks turn pink even in the near-darkness.

Despite the bags under his eyes, he already looked pretty awake and knowing him, he probably had been for some time.

Joe Liebgott was a notorious insomniac and it would take more than a couple air sickness pills to cure him of that.

Still a bit drowsy, the young OSS agent was in the process of stretching out her cramped legs to wake herself up when she received an elbow to her left side.

Her head whipped around and there was Skip, holding a pack of cigarettes and grinning at the couple like the Cheshire Cat.

“G’morning,” he chortled, waving the pack in front of them. “Either of you lovebirds care for a smoke?”

“Sure thing,” Joe replied eagerly, never one to turn down a cigarette, especially under stress. “Thanks!”

"Anytime, Lieb!"

Skip dutifully extended the pack across Alix’s lap so Joe could grab one before offering it to his best friend, his amber eyes twinkling knowingly.

“What about you, Pyro? You want one?”

Removing her thick gloves, Alix gave him a wry look.

“Depends. Does it come with an I-Told-You-So?”

“You know it does,” was the smug reply.

“Fine, fine,” she relented, plucking a cigarette from the pack with an exaggerated air of defeat “Go ahead, Skipper, let me have it.”

Ever the gentleman, her best friend at least had the decency to give all three of their cigarettes a light before settling back into his seat triumphantly like a king returned to his throne.

“I’m just saying, Pyro,” he yelled over the clamor of the engines, an all-too-satisfied expression painted across his face. “I fucking called it!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Alix responded, rolling her eyes amiably as she took a drag. “Rub it in more, why don’t you?”

“Nah,” Skip remarked cheerfully. “I figure I oughta leave some jokes for Don whenever he wakes up!”

Joe cocked his head to look at her, his brows knit quizzically, but Alix shook her head, still laughing.

Don’t ask.

For a brief moment, it was like she was back in Aldbourne again. No stakes, no fear, just joking around with the friends who had become like family to her with the man she loved by her side.

But as quickly as her laughter came, it disappeared.

The order was given, they stood, the light was green, Joe squeezed her hand quickly and then before she knew it, Alix was leaping out into the dark abyss below.

37 notes · View notes

cogitoergofun · 5 months

Text

When Javier Ortiz came home from a secret mission in Syria, the ghost of a dead girl appeared to him in his kitchen. She was pale and covered in chalky dust, as if hit by an explosion, and her eyes stared at him with a glare as dark and heavy as oil.

The 21-year-old Marine was part of an artillery gun crew that fought against the Islamic State, and he knew that his unit’s huge cannons had killed hundreds of enemy fighters. The ghost, he was sure, was their revenge.

A shiver went through him. He backed into another room in his apartment near Camp Pendleton in California and flicked on the lights, certain that he was imagining things. She was still there.

A few days later, in the barracks not far away, a 22-year-old Marine named Austin Powell pounded on his neighbor’s door in tears and stammered: “There’s something in my room! I’m hearing something in my room!”

His neighbor, Brady Zipoy, 20, searched the room but found nothing.

“It’s all right — I’ve been having problems, too,” Lance Corporal Zipoy said, tapping his head. The day before, he bent down to tie his boots and was floored by a sudden avalanche of emotion so overwhelming and bizarre that he had no words for it. “We’ll go see the doc,” he told his friend. “We’ll get help.”

All through their unit — Alpha Battery, 1st Battalion, 11th Marines — troops came home feeling cursed. And the same thing was happening in other Marine and Army artillery units.

An investigation by The New York Times found that many of the troops sent to bombard the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017 returned to the United States plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression and, in a few cases, hallucinations. Once-reliable Marines turned unpredictable and strange. Some are now homeless. A striking number eventually died by suicide, or tried to.

Interviews with more than 40 gun-crew veterans and their families in 16 states found that the military repeatedly struggled to determine what was wrong after the troops returned from Syria and Iraq.

All the gun crews filled out questionnaires to screen for post-traumatic stress disorder, and took tests to detect signs of traumatic brain injuries from enemy explosions. But the crews had been miles away from the front lines when they fired their long-range cannons, and most never saw direct fighting or suffered the kinds of combat injuries that the tests were designed to look for.

A few gun-crew members were eventually given diagnoses of P.T.S.D., but to the crews that didn’t make much sense. They hadn’t, in most cases, even seen the enemy.

The only thing remarkable about their deployments was the sheer number of artillery rounds they had fired.

The United States had made a strategic decision to avoid sending large numbers of ground troops to fight the Islamic State, and instead relied on airstrikes and a handful of powerful artillery batteries to, as one retired general said at the time, “pound the bejesus out of them.” The strategy worked: Islamic State positions were all but eradicated, and hardly any American troops were killed.

But it meant that a small number of troops had to fire tens of thousands of high-explosive shells — far more rounds per crew member, experts say, than any American artillery battery had fired at least since the Vietnam War.

Military guidelines say that firing all those rounds is safe. What happened to the crews suggests that those guidelines were wrong.

2 notes · View notes

nicklloydnow · 6 months

Text

“An investigation by The New York Times found that many of the troops sent to bombard the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017 returned to the United States plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression and, in a few cases, hallucinations. Once-reliable Marines turned unpredictable and strange. Some are now homeless. A striking number eventually died by suicide, or tried to.

Interviews with more than 40 gun-crew veterans and their families in 16 states found that the military repeatedly struggled to determine what was wrong after the troops returned from Syria and Iraq.

A few gun-crew members were eventually given diagnoses of P.T.S.D., but to the crews that didn’t make much sense. They hadn’t, in most cases, even seen the enemy.

The only thing remarkable about their deployments was the sheer number of artillery rounds they had fired.

(…)

Military guidelines say that firing all those rounds is safe. What happened to the crews suggests that those guidelines were wrong.

The cannon blasts were strong enough to hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and each unleashed a shock wave that shot through the crew members’ bodies, vibrating bone, punching lungs and hearts, and whipping at cruise-missile speeds through the most delicate organ of all, the brain.

More than a year after Marines started experiencing problems, the Marine Corps leadership tried to piece together what was happening by ordering a study of one of the hardest-hit units, Fox Battery, 2nd Battalion, 10th Marines.

The research was limited to reviewing the troops’ medical records. No Marines were examined or interviewed. Even so, the report, published in 2019, made a startling finding: The gun crews were being hurt by their own weapons.

More than half the Marines in the battery had eventually received diagnoses of traumatic brain injuries, according to a briefing prepared for Marine Corps headquarters. The report warned that the experience in Syria showed that firing a high number of rounds, day after day, could incapacitate crews “faster than combat replacements can be trained to replace them.”

The military did not seem to be taking the threat seriously, the briefing cautioned: Safety training — both for gun crews and medical personnel — was so deficient, it said, that the risks of repeated blast exposure “are seemingly ignored.”

Despite the concerns raised in the report, no one appears to have warned the commanders responsible for the gun crews. And no one told the hundreds of troops who had fired the rounds.

Instead, in case after case, the military treated the crews’ combat injuries as routine psychiatric disorders, if they treated them at all. Troops were told they had attention deficit disorder or depression. Many were given potent psychotropic drugs that made it hard to function and failed to provide much relief.

Others who started acting strangely after the deployments were simply dismissed as problems, punished for misconduct and forced out of the military in punitive ways that cut them off from the veterans’ health care benefits that they now desperately need.

(…)

Firing weapons is as fundamental to military service as tackling is to football. And research has started to reveal that, as with hits in football, repeated blast exposure from firing heavy weapons like cannons, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets and even large-caliber machine guns may cause irreparable injury to the brain. It is a sprawling problem that the military is just starting to come to grips with.

The science is still in its infancy, but evidence suggests that while individual blasts rippling through brain tissue may not cause obvious, lasting injury, repeated exposure appears to create scarring that eventually could cause neural connections to fail, according to Gary Kamimori, a senior Army blast researcher who retired recently after a career studying the problem.

“Think of it like a rubber band,” he said. “Stretch a rubber band a hundred times and it bounces back, but there are micro tears forming. The hundred-and-first time, it breaks.”

Those blasts might never cause a person to see stars or experience other signs of concussion, but over time they may lead to sleeplessness, depression, anxiety and other symptoms that in many ways resemble P.T.S.D., according to Dr. Daniel Perl, a neuropathologist who runs a Defense Department tissue bank that preserves dead veterans’ brains for research.

“It’s common to mistake a blast injury in the brain for something else, because when you walk into a clinic, it looks like a lot of other things,” Dr. Perl said.

His lab has examined samples from hundreds of deceased veterans who were exposed to enemy explosions and blasts from firing weapons during their military careers. The researchers found a unique and consistent pattern of microscopic scarring.

Finding that pattern in living veterans is another matter. There is currently no brain scan or blood test that can detect the minute injuries, Dr. Perl said; the damage can be seen only under microscopes once a service member has died. So there is no definitive way to tell whether a living person is injured. Even if there were, there is no therapy to fix it.

The lab hasn’t examined any brains from artillery units sent to fight the Islamic State, but Dr. Perl said that he would not be surprised if many of them were affected. “You have a blast wave traveling at the speed of sound through the most complex and intricate organ in the body,” he said. “Wouldn’t you think there would be some damage?”

The military for generations set maximum safe blast-exposure levels for eardrums and lungs, but never for brains. Anything that didn’t leave troops dazed was generally considered safe. But that has recently changed.

Over the last decade, veterans suffering from brain injury-like symptoms after years of firing weapons pressured Congress to rethink the potential dangers, and lawmakers passed a number of bills from 2018 to 2022 ordering the Pentagon to start a sprawling “Warfighter Brain Health Initiative” to try to measure blast exposure and develop protocols to protect troops.

(…)

In response to questions from The Times, both the Army and Marine Corps acknowledged that some gun crew members were injured by blasts during the fight against the Islamic State. In part because of that experience, the branches say they now have programs to track and limit crews’ exposure.

But a Marine officer currently in charge of an artillery battery questioned whether that was accurate. He said recently that he has never seen or heard of the new safety guidelines, and that nothing was being done to document his troops’ blast exposure.

The officer, who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said he was experiencing splitting headaches and small seizures, but was worried that his injuries would not be acknowledged because there was no documentation that he was ever exposed to anything dangerous.

In short, he said, there is little in military regulations now that might stop what happened to the artillery troops in Syria and Iraq from happening again.

(…)

Night and day they hurled rounds, using some of the military’s most sophisticated cannons, M777A2 howitzers. The 35-foot-long guns had modern, precisely designed titanium parts and a digital targeting system, but when it came to protecting the crew the design had changed little in a century. Gun crews still worked within arm’s reach of the barrel and fired the gun by pulling a simple cord.

The resulting blast was several times louder than a jet taking off, and unleashed a shock wave that hit the crews like a kick to the chest. Ears rang, bones shivered, vision blurred as eyeballs momentarily compressed, and a ripple shot through every neuron in the brain like a whipcrack.

“You feel it in your core, you feel it in your teeth,” said Carson Brown, a corporal from Idaho who pulled the firing cord for hundreds of shots. “It’s like it takes a year off your life.”

(…)

The demands of Task Force 9 led to rates of artillery fire not seen in generations.

During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, artillery crews fired an average of 70 rounds during the entire six-week campaign, said John Grenier, a historian at the Army’s Field Artillery School. During the initial months of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, crews fired an average of 260 rounds. In Syria, each gun in Alpha battery shot more than 1,100 rounds in two months — most of them using high-powered charges that produce the strongest shock waves. Some guns in Fox battery, which replaced Alpha, fired about 10,000 rounds each.

“It’s shocking, insane,” Mr. Grenier said.

Under the relentless tempo, Marines would wake up feeling hung over and stagger to the guns like zombies. Their sense of taste changed. Some threw up. Crews grew irritable and fights broke out.

The symptoms were telltale signs of concussion, but also what anyone might feel after a string of stressful 20-hour workdays in the desert, sleeping in foxholes and eating rations from plastic pouches. Medics came around daily to check on the crews but never intervened. And Marines trained to endure didn’t complain.

(…)

Traumatic brain injuries can have profound effects on parts of the body that are nowhere near the skull, because the damage can cause communication with other organs to malfunction. Dozens of the young veterans interviewed by The Times said they now had elevated, irregular heartbeats and persistent, painful problems with their digestion.

(…)

All four of the artillery batteries examined by The Times have had at least one suicide — a striking pattern, since death by suicide is rare even in high-risk populations. Some batteries have had several, and many service members said in interviews that they had tried to kill themselves.

(…)

The Defense Department has spent more than a billion dollars in the last decade to research traumatic brain injury, but it still knows very little about what might have happened to the artillery crews. Nearly all of the research has focused on big explosions from roadside bombs and other enemy attacks, not the blast waves from the routine firing of weapons.

Still, as that research progressed and studies tried to define the threshold at which an explosion caused brain damage, a growing amount of data suggested that the level was much lower than expected — so low, in fact, that it wasn’t much different from what troops experienced when they pulled the cord on an artillery cannon.

(…)

Under an electron microscope, a ravaged neural landscape came into focus. Sheaths of myelin, vital for insulating the biological wiring of the brain, hung in tatters. In key parts of the brain that control emotion and executive function, large numbers of mitochondria — the tiny powerhouses that provide energy for each cell — were dead.

“It was remarkable — the damage was very widespread,” Dr. Gu said. “And that was just from one explosion.”

Of course, the brains of mice and humans are very different. Dr. Scott Cota, a Navy captain and brain injury expert, said it was unclear whether the same damage would occur in human brains. Researchers can’t expose humans to damaging blasts, and then dissect them the way they can mice, he said. And techniques are not yet available to detect microscopic trauma in living brains.

“It’s very hard to study,” Dr. Cota said. “And unfortunately, we can only do it post-mortem at this point.”

The artillery gun crews present a rare and valuable chance to understand how blasts affect the brain, but no researchers are tracking them. It’s not clear if anyone in a position to learn from them is even aware that this unique group of combat veterans exists.

Most of the crew members have drifted out of the military to corners of the country where they continue to quietly grapple with headaches, depression and confusion that they don’t understand.”

#traumatic brain injury #tbi #chronic traumatic encephalopathy #cte #post traumatic stress disorder #ptsd #concussion

2 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 9 months

Text

With the vast majority of the world’s governments committed to decarbonizing their economies in the next two generations, we are embarked on a voyage into the unknown. What was once an argument over carbon pricing and emissions trading has turned into an industrial policy race. Along the way there will be resistance and denial. There will also be breakthroughs and unexpected wins. The cost of solar and wind power has fallen spectacularly in the last 20 years. Battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs) have moved from fantasy to ubiquitous reality.

But alongside outright opposition and clear wins, we will also have to contend with situations that are murkier, with wishful thinking and motivated reasoning. As we search for technical solutions to the puzzle of decarbonization, we must beware the mirages of the energy transition.

On a desert trek a mirage can be fatal. Walk too far in the wrong direction, and there may be no way back. You succumb to exhaustion before you can find real water. On the other hand, if you don’t head toward what looks like an oasis, you cannot be sure that you will find another one in time.

Right now, we face a similar dilemma, a dilemma of huge proportions not with regard to H2O but one of its components, H2—hydrogen. Is hydrogen a key part of the world’s energy future or a dangerous fata morgana? It is a question on which tens of trillions of dollars in investment may end up hinging. And scale matters.

For decades, economists warned of the dangers of trying through industrial policy to pick winners. The risk is not just that you might fail, but that in doing so you incur costs. You commit real resources that foreclose other options. The lesson was once that we should leave it to the market. But that was a recipe for a less urgent time. The climate crisis gives us no time. We cannot avoid the challenge of choosing our energy future. As Chuck Sabel and David Victor argue in their important new book Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World, it is through local partnership and experimentation that we are most likely to find answers to these technical dilemmas. But, as the case of hydrogen demonstrates, we must beware the efforts of powerful vested interests to use radical technological visions to channel us towards what are in fact conservative and ruinously expensive options.

In the energy future there are certain elements that seem clear. Electricity is going to play a much bigger role than ever before in our energy mix. But some very knotty problems remain. Can electricity suffice? How do you unleash the chemical reactions necessary to produce essential building blocks of modern life like fertilizer and cement without employing hydrocarbons and applying great heat? To smelt the 1.8 billion tons of steel we use every year, you need temperatures of almost 2,000 degrees Celsius. Can we get there without combustion? How do you power aircraft flying thousands of miles, tens of thousands of feet in the air? How do you propel giant container ships around the world? Electric motors and batteries can hardly suffice.

Hydrogen recommends itself as a solution because it burns very hot. And when it does, it releases only water. We know how to make hydrogen by running electric current through water. And we know how to generate electricity cleanly. Green hydrogen thus seems easily within reach. Alternatively, if hydrogen is manufactured using natural gas rather than electrolysis, the industrial facilities can be adapted to allow immediate, at-source CO2 capture. This kind of hydrogen is known as blue hydrogen.

Following this engineering logic, H2 is presented by its advocates as a Swiss army knife of the energy transition, a versatile adjunct to the basic strategy of electrifying everything. The question is whether H2 solutions, though they may be technically viable, make any sense from the point of view of the broader strategy of energy transition, or whether they might in fact be an expensive wrong turn.

Using hydrogen as an energy store is hugely inefficient. With current technology producing hydrogen from water by way of electrolysis consumes vastly more energy than will be stored and ultimately released by burning the hydrogen. Why not use the same electricity to generate the heat or drive a motor directly? The necessary electrolysis equipment is expensive. And though hydrogen may burn cleanly, as a fuel it is inconvenient because of its corrosive properties, its low energy per unit of volume, and its tendency to explode. Storing and moving hydrogen around will require huge investment in shipping facilities, pipelines, filling stations, or facilities to convert hydrogen into the more stable form of ammonia.

The kind of schemes pushed by hydrogen’s lobbyists foresee annual consumption rising by 2050 to more than 600 million tons per annum, compared to 100 million tons today. This would consume a huge share of green electricity production. In a scenario favored by the Hydrogen Council, of the United States’ 2,900 gigawatts of renewable energy production, 650 gigawatts would be consumed by hydrogen electrolysis. That is almost three times the total capacity of renewable power installed today.

The costs will be gigantic. The cost for a hydrogen build-out over coming decades could run into the tens of trillions of dollars. Added to which, to work as a system, the investment in hydrogen production, transport, and consumption will have to be undertaken simultaneously.

Little wonder, perhaps, that though the vision of the “hydrogen economy” as an integrated economic and technical system has been around for half a century, we have precious little actual experience with hydrogen fuel. Indeed, there is an entire cottage industry of hydrogen skeptics. The most vocal of these is Michael Liebreich, whose consultancy has popularized the so-called hydrogen ladder, designed to highlight how unrealistic many of them are. If one follows the Liebreich analysis, the vast majority of proposed hydrogen uses in transport and industrial heating are, in fact, unrealistic due to their sheer inefficiency. In each case there is an obvious alternative, most of them including the direct application of electricity.

Nevertheless, in the last six years a huge coalition of national governments and industrial interests has assembled around the promise of a hydrogen-based economy.

The Hydrogen Council boasts corporate sponsors ranging from Airbus and Aramco to BMW, Daimler Truck, Honda, Toyota and Hyundai, Siemens, Shell, and Microsoft. The national governments of Japan, South Korea, the EU, the U.K., the U.S., and China all have hydrogen strategies. There are new project announcements regularly. Experimental shipments of ammonia have docked in Japan. The EU is planning an elaborate network of pipelines, known as the hydrogen backbone. All told, the Hydrogen Council counts $320 billion in hydrogen projects announced around the world.

Given the fact that many new uses of hydrogen are untested, and given the skepticism among many influential energy economists and engineers, it is reasonable to ask what motivates this wave of commitments to the hydrogen vision.

In technological terms, hydrogen may represent a shimmering image of possibility on a distant horizon, but in political economy terms, it has a more immediate role. It is a route through which existing fossil fuel interests can imagine a place for themselves in the new energy future. The presence of oil majors and energy companies in the ranks of the Hydrogen Council is not coincidental. Hydrogen enables natural gas suppliers to imagine that they can transition their facilities to green fuels. Makers of combustion engines and gas turbines can conceive of burning hydrogen instead. Storing hydrogen or ammonia like gas or oil promises a solution to the issues of intermittency in renewable power generation and may extend the life of gas turbine power stations. For governments around the world, a more familiar technology than one largely based on solar panels, windmills, and batteries is a way of calming nerves about the transformation they have notionally signed up for.

Looking at several key geographies in which hydrogen projects are currently being discussed offers a compound psychological portrait of the common moment of global uncertainty.

The first country to formulate a national hydrogen strategy was Japan. Japan has long pioneered exotic energy solutions. Since undersea pipelines to Japan are impractical, it was Japanese demand that gave life to the seaborne market for liquefied natural gas (LNG). What motivated the hydrogen turn in 2017 was a combination of post-Fukushima shock, perennial anxiety about energy security, and a long-standing commitment to hydrogen by key Japanese car manufacturers. Though Toyota, the world’s no. 1 car producer, pioneered the hybrid in the form of the ubiquitous Prius, it has been slow to commit to full electric. The same is true for the other East Asian car producers—Honda, Nissan, and South Korea’s Hyundai. In the face of fierce competition from cheap Chinese electric vehicles, they embrace a government commitment to hydrogen, which in the view of many experts concentrates on precisely the wrong areas i.e. transport and electricity generation, rather than industrial applications.

The prospect of a substantial East Asian import demand for hydrogen encourages the economists at the Hydrogen Council to imagine a global trade in hydrogen that essentially mirrors the existing oil and gas markets. These have historically centered on flows of hydrocarbons from key producing regions such as North Africa, the Middle East, and North America to importers in Europe and Asia. Fracked natural gas converted into LNG is following this same route. And it seems possible that hydrogen and ammonia derived from hydrogen may do the same.

CF Industries, the United States’ largest producer ammonia, has finalized a deal to ship blue ammonia to Japan’s largest power utility for use alongside oil and gas in power generation. The CO2 storage that makes the ammonia blue rather than gray has been contracted between CF Industries and U.S. oil giant Exxon. A highly defensive strategy in Japan thus serves to provide a market for a conservative vision of the energy transition in the United Sates as well. Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco, by far the world’s largest oil company, is touting shipments of blue ammonia, which it hopes to deliver to Japan or East Asia. Though the cost in terms of energy content is the equivalent of around $250 per barrel of oil, Aramco hopes to ship 11 million tons of blue ammonia to world markets by 2030.

To get through the current gas crisis, EU nations have concluded LNG deals with both the Gulf states and the United States. Beyond LNG, it is also fully committed to the hydrogen bandwagon. And again, this follows a defensive logic. The aim is to use green or blue hydrogen or ammonia to find a new niche for European heavy industry, which is otherwise at risk of being entirely knocked out of world markets by high energy prices and Europe’s carbon levy.

The European steel industry today accounts for less than ten percent of global production. It is a leader in green innovation. And the world will need technological first-movers to shake up the fossil-fuel dependent incumbents, notably in China. But whether this justifies Europe’s enormous commitment to hydrogen is another question. It seems motivated more by the desire to hold up the process of deindustrialization and worries about working-class voters drifting into the arms of populists, than by a forward looking strategic calculus.

In the Netherlands, regions that have hitherto served as hubs for global natural gas trading are now competing for designation as Europe’s “hydrogen valley.” In June, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni inked the contract on the SoutH2 Corridor, a pipeline that will carry H2 up the Italian peninsula to Austria and southern Germany. Meanwhile, France has pushed Spain into agreeing to a subsea hydrogen connection rather than a natural gas pipeline over the Pyrenees. Spain and Portugal have ample LNG terminal capacity. But Spain’s solar and wind potential also make it Europe’s natural site for green hydrogen production and a “green hydrogen” pipe, regardless of its eventual uses, looks in the words of one commentator looks “less pharaonic and fossil-filled” than the original natural gas proposal.

How much hydrogen will actually be produced in Europe remains an open question. Proximity to the point of consumption and the low capital costs of investment in Europe speak in favor of local production. But one of the reasons that hydrogen projects appeal to European strategists is that they offer a new vision of European-African cooperation. Given demographic trends and migration pressure, Europe desperately needs to believe that it has a promising African strategy. Africa’s potential for renewable electricity generation is spectacular. Germany has recently entered into a hydrogen partnership with Namibia. But this raises new questions.

First and foremost, where will a largely desert country source the water for electrolysis? Secondly, will Namibia export only hydrogen, ammonia, or some of the industrial products made with the green inputs? It would be advantageous for Namibia to develop a heavy-chemicals and iron-smelting industry. But from Germany’s point of view, that might well defeat the object, which is precisely to provide affordable green energy with which to keep industrial jobs in Europe.

A variety of conservative motives thus converge in the hydrogen coalition. Most explicit of all is the case of post-Brexit Britain. Once a leader in the exit from coal, enabled by a “dash for gas” and offshore wind, the U.K. has recently hit an impasse. Hard-to-abate sectors like household heating, which in the U.K. is heavily dependent on natural gas, require massive investments in electrification, notably in heat pumps. These are expensive. In the United Kingdom, the beleaguered Tory government, which has presided over a decade of stagnating real incomes, is considering as an alternative the widespread introduction of hydrogen for domestic heating. Among energy experts this idea is widely regarded as an impractical boondoggle for the gas industry that defers the eventual and inevitable electrification at the expense of prolonged household emissions. But from the point of view of politics, it has the attraction that it costs relatively less per household to replace natural gas with hydrogen.

As this brief tour suggests, there is every reason to fear that tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, vast amounts of political capital, and precious time are being invested in “green” energy investments, the main attraction of which is that they minimize change and perpetuate as far as possible the existing patterns of the hydrocarbon energy system. This is not greenwashing in the simple sense of rebadging or mislabeling. If carried through, it is far more substantial than that. It will build ships and put pipes in the ground. It will consume huge amounts of desperately scarce green electricity. And this faces us with a dilemma.

In confronting the challenge of the energy transition, we need a bias for action. We need to experiment. There is every reason to trust in learning-curve effects. Electrolyzers, for instance, will get more affordable, reducing the costs of hydrogen production. At certain times and in certain places, green power may well become so abundant that pouring it into electrolysis makes sense. And even if many hydrogen projects do not succeed, that may be a risk worth taking. We will likely learn new techniques in the process. In facing the uncertainties of the energy transition, we need to cultivate a tolerance for failure. Furthermore, even if hydrogen is a prime example of corporate log-rolling, we should presumably welcome the broadening of the green coalition to include powerful fossil fuel interests.

The real and inescapable tradeoff arises when we commit scarce resources—both real and political—to the hydrogen dream. The limits of public tolerance for the costs of the energy transition are already abundantly apparent, in Asia and Europe as well as in the United States. Pumping money into subsidies that generate huge economies of scale and cost reductions is one thing. Wasting money on lame-duck projects with little prospect of success is quite another. What is at stake is ultimately the legitimacy of the energy transition as such.

In the end, there is no patented method distinguishing self-serving hype from real opportunity. There is no alternative but to subject competing claims to intense public, scientific, and technical scrutiny. And if the ship has already sailed and subsidies are already on the table, then retrospective cost-benefit assessment is called for.

Ideally, the approach should be piecemeal and stepwise, and in this regard the crucial thing to note about hydrogen is that to regard it as a futuristic fantasy is itself misguided. We already live in a hydrogen-based world. Two key sectors of modern industry could not operate without it. Oil refining relies on hydrogen, as does the production of fertilizer by the Haber-Bosch process on which we depend for roughly half of our food production. These two sectors generate the bulk of the demand for the masses of hydrogen we currently consume.

We may not need 600 million, 500 million, or even 300 million tons of green and blue hydrogen by 2050. But we currently use about 100 million, and of that total, barely 1 million is clean. It is around that core that hydrogen experimentation should be concentrated, in places where an infrastructure already exists. This is challenging because transporting hydrogen is expensive, and many of the current points of use of hydrogen, notably in Europe, are not awash in cheap green power. But there are two places where the conditions for experimentation within the existing hydrogen economy seem most propitious.

One is China, and specifically northern China and Inner Mongolia, where China currently concentrates a large part of its immense production of fertilizer, cement, and much of its steel industry. China is leading the world in the installation of solar and wind power and is pioneering ultra-high-voltage transmission. Unlike Japan and South Korea, China has shown no particular enthusiasm for hydrogen. It is placing the biggest bet in the world on the more direct route to electrification by way of renewable generation and batteries. But China is already the largest and lowest-cost producer of electrolysis equipment. In 2022, China launched a modestly proportioned hydrogen strategy. In cooperation with the United Nations it has iniated an experiment with green fertilizer production, and who would bet against its chances of establishing a large-scale hydrogen energy system?

The other key player is the United States. After years of delay, the U.S. lags far behind in photovoltaics batteries, and offshore wind. But in hydrogen, and specifically in the adjoining states of Texas and Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico, it has obvious advantages over any other location in the West. The United States is home to a giant petrochemicals complex. It is the only Western economy that can compete with India and China in fertilizer production. In Texas, there are actually more than 2500 kilometers of hardened hydrogen pipelines. And insofar as players like Exxon have a green energy strategy, it is carbon sequestration, which will be the technology needed for blue hydrogen production.

It is not by accident that America’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, targeted its most generous subsidies—the most generous ever offered for green energy in the United States—on hydrogen production. The hydrogen lobby is hard at work, and it has turned Texas into the lowest-cost site for H2 production in the Western world. It is not a model one would want to see emulated anywhere else, but it may serve as a technology incubator that charts what is viable and what is not.

There is very good reason to suspect the motives of every player in the energy transition. Distinguishing true innovation from self-serving conservatism is going to be a key challenge in the new era in which we have to pick winners. We need to develop a culture of vigilance. But there are also good reasons to expect certain key features of the new to grow out of the old. Innovation is miraculous but it rarely falls like mana from heaven. As Sabel and Victor argue in their book, it grows from within expert technical communities with powerful vested interests in change. The petrochemical complex of the Gulf of Mexico may seem an unlikely venue for the birth of a green new future, but it is only logical that the test of whether the hydrogen economy is a real possibility will be run at the heart of the existing hydrocarbon economy.

4 notes · View notes

scotianostra · 2 years

Photo

12th August 1332 saw the Battle of Dupplin Moor when Scots under Domhnall II, Earl of Mar are routed by Edward Balliol.

As battles go this was a disaster for the Scots fighting on behalf King David II, who was a child at the time. So what went wrong?

Looking at the figures Balliol’s army that included the disinherited and mercenaries from England and Wales, who really should have had no chance.

The numbers involved, as usual vary, some say there were about 5,000 Scots, but it is generally said that at least 15,000 were fighting for the Scottish King, son of Robert the Bruce, other sources put the number at up to 40,000. The usurper’s army has been put at around just 1500, they were outnumbered by 10 to 1.

After a skirmish at Kinghorn, where they landed, the Disinherited soon marched for Perth, to engage the smaller of two armies that were being mustered against them. A few miles to the south west of the town, on Dupplin Moor, a heavily outnumbered, mainly English force, destroyed the far larger Scottish army, using tactics that would make English armies a dominant force in Europe for the next hundred years. Edward III of England was using this as more or less a testing ground for his new highly disciplined bowmen that he “lent” Balliol.

The Scottish army under the experienced regent Donald of Mar was split into two divisions, most of whom were carrying the traditional Scottish long spear. The English adopted tactics they would put to good use in the decades after, , where the men-at-arms all dismounted and formed into lines to protect the ranks of Welsh mercenary longbowmen, on loan from Edward III. Since the Scots had the advantage of numbers and naturally wished to drive the invading force from Scottish soil, they attacked and charged Balliol's lines with the Highland charge, however they failed to break through and were pressed back; thus exposed on the field of battle they became targets for the longbowmen and the Scots were hit by the volleys of arrows sent in their direction. The second Scottish division was then ordered to attack and split into two columns and tried to outflank Balliol's force. This second charge got nowhere near Balliol's lines as they too were cut down by the volleys of arrows sent in their direction. Once the second charge had failed the Scots fell back in disarray, their retreat being hampered as they stumbled amongst the casualties already lying on the ground, making themselves even easier targets for the enemy longbows. The battle turned into a rout and according to one account the Scottish dead were said to he piled fifteen feet high whilst the English men-at-arms patiently waded through the battlefield finishing off any Scot that showed any signs of life. By the end of the battle the Scottish dead included the earl of Mar himself, the earl of Menteith and the earl of Moray, the High Chamberlain Alexander Fraser, eighteen other Scottish barons and at least 2,000 soldiers from the Scottish army. (Although estimates of the Scottish dead vary wildly and as high as ten or thirteen thousand in some cases.)

You know I like to delve into the chroniclers of the day, as close as we get to a newspaper in medieval times, and if you follow my posts you will also know that, much like today they were biased in there reports. The main English chronicle of the day was written by the Franciscan monks at Lanecrost.

Priory of Lanercostewas in northern English, in what is now Cumberland, it covers the history during the years 1201 to 1346. Not surprisingly the Monks were Pro-English, probably what we would call a headline nowadays the Monks reported that in Perthshire at the battle "A most marvellous thing happened that day..." The chronicler's definition of 'marvellous' might not be everyone's, as he was enthusing over the great piles of dead soldiers that lay on the field of Dupplin Moor - "the pile of dead rising up from the ground was more than a spear's length in height", drooled the chronicler, clearly experiencing a tight little thrill of ecstasy at the thought.

Another chronicler and historian John Capgrave wrote an account almost 200 years that would have been drawn from the more contemporary Lanecrost accounts and describes the carnage at Dupplin thus;

In this battle...more were slain by the Scots themselves than by the English. For rushing forward on each other, each crushed his neighbour, and for every one fallen there fell a second, and then a third fell, and those who were behind pressing forward and hastening to the fight, the whole army became a heap of the slain.

The true casualty figures will likely never be known, but it seems clear that the Scots casualties were in the thousands, while the Disinherited lost two knights and 33 squires. It was one of the worst defeats suffered by the Scots on home soil. Scottish casualties were divided between the large number that were killed in the main body of the fighting and those who were able to retreat and start to escape the battle.

Edward Balliol would eventually be sent scampering back to England, I have covered him in other posts throughout the year.

#Scotland #scottish #medieval history #medieval warfare #battle #history

16 notes · View notes

thousandmaths · 2 years

Text

Still adventuring, 5 years later

Margin Call is a 2011 movie largely centered on a single evening during which a young analyst at a financial firm learns, seemingly before anyone else, that things are about to go south real soon. The firm is unnamed, and the exact nature of the crisis is shrouded in Wall Street jargon, but it’s set in 2008. Make of that what you will.

And if you’ve already seen it, you probably already know the scene I want to talk about.

The focus of the screencap above is on Eric Dale, a guy at the firm who sensed that something was going wrong but was fired just before being able to put all the pieces together. This scene occurs late in the movie; it’s the first time in over an hour that Dale has been back on the screen, and we’re all waiting for what he’s going to say about the goings-on at the firm in the day since he left.

He says little, outside of this monologue:

Do you know I built a bridge once? [...] I was an engineer by trade.

It went from Dilles Bottom, Ohio to Moundsville, West Virginia. It spanned nine hundred and twelve feet above the Ohio River. Twelve thousand people used this thing a day. And it cut out thirty-five miles of driving each way between Wheeling and New Martinsville. That's a combined eight hundred and forty-seven thousand miles, of driving, a day. Or twenty-five million, four hundred and ten thousand miles a month. And three hundred and four million, nine hundred and twenty thousand miles a year. Saved.

Now I completed that project in 1986, that's twenty-two years ago. So over the life of that one bridge, that's six billion, seven hundred and eight million, two hundred and forty thousand miles that haven't had to be driven. At, what, let's say fifty miles an hour? So that's, what, uhhh, a hundred thirty four million, one hundred sixty-five thousand, eight hundred hours. Orrr, five hundred fifty-nine thousand, twenty days. So that one little bridge has saved the people of those communities a combined one thousand five hundred and thirty-one years of their lives, not wasted in a fucking car.

One thousand five hundred and thirty-one years.

------

As you may have guessed, Margin Call is a movie that is absolutely obsessed with numbers. They don’t usually come as fast and thick as they do in this scene. Still, they are pervasive in the movie, both by impact and incantation. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the screenwriter J.C. Chandor has some kind of weird deep-seated number fetish.

But after giving it some thought this weekend, I desperately want to write an extended essay about how numbers are deployed in Margin Call. It was said of the legendary 20th century Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan that “every positive integer was one of his personal friends.” The film has a very different relationship with positive integers than Ramanujan did, but the quote popped to mind as I reflected— the film’s relationship no less intimate.

I believe the reason this scene has stuck with me for so long is that there is an almost comedic tinge to it: this is a story whose main character is a bridge. There are no people in this story, except the aggregated twelve thousand drivers “of those communities” who use the bridge. Even the people who constructed the bridge are sidelined in the narrative. And yet it’s a story with deep respect for humanity. It’s a story about compassion, about our ability to build a better life for others, about how labor can be elevated above pure productivity to be truly meaningful.

It is a direct refutation of the thesis of the main protagonist, the generally sympathetic (and not pictured) young analyst, who says “Well it’s all just numbers, really, just changing what you’re adding up.”

------

It had never occurred to me until writing this post, that I might want to learn to recite that scene in Margin Call by memory, as if it were a poem.

When I was younger I used to memorize so many things. Aside from the routine facts from school and countless songs, there were also dozens if not hundreds of entire pre-meme internet videos that I could quote verbatim. By the time I started writing OTAM, such memorization of random content was no longer a guiding principle of my life. Even classics that I remember fondly like “End of Ze World” and “Ultimate Fight of Ultimate Destiny”, now languish only half-remembered in the pubescent voice of my inner teenager.

But in 2019 I found it in myself to go back and learn one of my favorites, a piece of internet history that is known if not famous, which has always meant more to me than it has to the world: Tanya Davis’s “How to be Alone.”

(The linked youtube video is Davis’s own performance, with lovely editing by Andrea Dorfman. At the time of this writing, it has nine million, six hundred eighty-eight thousand, one hundred twenty-eight views.)

The story of why I chose to do that is a little too personal to share here, the wounds a little too deep*. But I performed it at a small talent show during a summer program. I took the almost-decade of hearing and giving and studying math talks (and the year spent in endless depressive YouTube stupor) and made myself a slam poet, for just a moment.

I’ve never performed it for anyone else, and I might never again. But, I have indeed performed it— oh yes, I have, in the last three years. That poem has been stitched into my heart, with a needle and thread.

------

( * I cry a bit as I write these words, weeping for lost naïveté. When I wrote my thousandth post for this blog, I wanted nothing more than to be seen, known, understood. In the five long years since then, I’ve learned many harsh lessons about the virtues of an inner life. )

------

Today is the five-year anniversary of the official ending date of One Thousand Adventures in Mathematics.

(No, I didn’t accidentally post this to the wrong blog. I meant to write all that stuff up there XD)

I’m sure it will not surprise you to learn that a lot has happened. I am a very different person than I was when I was writing OTAM. But not everything has changed; I am still an academic mathematician. And since you probably followed me for math and not film critique, here’s a brief update on the big CV bullet points.

As I mentioned in the last post about a year ago, I received my PhD in combinatorics and accepted a postdoc at Charles University in Prague. There, I attempted to learn number theory, and I would not describe that attempt as a success. As a result, I chose to leave the postdoc early and return to the US.

Fortunately, I was already planning on flying to Denver to attend my second Graduate Research Workshop in Combinatorics, where I applied for and received an adjunct position at Champlain College in Vermont. We’re now over four weeks into the semester.

I’ve now had three poster presentations accepted at the Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics [the third one isn’t public yet :/] . I’ve given about 1.5 of them. (Shoutout to Nathan Williams for doing the heavy lifting on the Strange Expectations poster :D) Shortly before I graduated, I published the first half of my thesis as one paper. Because of the nature of my work in Prague, this is still my only serious publication. There are things in the works— in no small part due to the GRWC this summer— but I am frankly a bit annoyed that I couldn’t get more done last year.

If you’re reading this post, you probably have seen some other posts on this blog. You may even be responsible for one of the small handful of notes that I still receive weekly on my now-quite-old posts. I have already said thank you several times, but I am going to say it again. Thank you.

Finally, this won’t be the last post on this blog. I plan to keep making occasional updates on my professional activities as long as I remain in academia. This is really important to me, because a lot of the value of OTAM was always in seeing someone grow mathematically during a pivotal moment of their education. I feel it would be dishonest if I didn’t say where that all ended up leading. The academic environment is toxic and the job market is hell. I won’t claim my story is representative, and I’ve learned to recognize the taste of privilege. But the only way I can think to say thank you in any meaningful sense is by letting you all see this story to something resembling its completion.

9 notes · View notes

recentlyheardcom · 5 months

Text

When then-Lance Cpl. Javier Ortiz came home from a secret mission in Syria, the ghost of a dead girl appeared to him in his kitchen. She was pale and covered in chalky dust, as if hit by an explosion, and her eyes stared at him with a glare as dark and heavy as oil.The 21-year-old Marine was part of an artillery gun crew that fought against the Islamic State group, and he knew that his unit’s huge cannons had killed hundreds of enemy fighters. The ghost, he was sure, was their revenge.A shiver went through him. He backed into another room in his apartment near Camp Pendleton in California and flicked on the lights, certain that he was imagining things. She was still there.Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesA few days later, in the barracks not far away, a 22-year-old Marine, Lance Cpl. Austin Powell, pounded on his neighbor’s door in tears and stammered, “There’s something in my room! I’m hearing something in my room!”His neighbor, Lance Cpl. Brady Zipoy, 20, searched the room but found nothing.“It’s all right; I’ve been having problems, too,” Zipoy said, tapping his head. The day before, he bent down to tie his boots and was floored by a sudden avalanche of emotion so overwhelming and bizarre that he had no words for it. “We’ll go see the doc,” he told his friend. “We’ll get help.”All through their unit — Alpha Battery, 1st Battalion, 11th Marines — troops came home feeling cursed. And the same thing was happening in other Marine and Army artillery units.An investigation by The New York Times found that many of the troops sent to bombard the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017 returned to the United States plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression and, in a few cases, hallucinations. Once-reliable Marines turned unpredictable and strange. Some are now homeless. A striking number eventually died by suicide, or tried to.Interviews with more than 40 gun crew veterans and their families in 16 states found that the military repeatedly struggled to determine what was wrong after the troops returned from Syria and Iraq.All the gun crews filled out questionnaires to screen for post-traumatic stress disorder and took tests to detect signs of traumatic brain injuries from enemy explosions. But the crews had been miles away from the front lines when they fired their long-range cannons, and most never saw direct fighting or suffered the kinds of combat injuries that the tests were designed to look for.A few gun crew members were eventually given diagnoses of PTSD, but to the crews, that didn’t make much sense. They hadn’t, in most cases, even seen the enemy.The only thing remarkable about their deployments was the sheer number of artillery rounds they had fired.The United States had made a strategic decision to avoid sending large numbers of ground troops to fight the Islamic State, and instead relied on airstrikes and a handful of powerful artillery batteries to, as one retired general said at the time, “pound the bejesus out of them.” The strategy worked: Islamic State positions were all but eradicated, and hardly any U.S. troops were killed.But it meant that a small number of troops had to fire tens of thousands of high-explosive shells — far more rounds per crew member, experts say, than any U.S. artillery battery had fired at least since the Vietnam War.Military guidelines say that firing all those rounds is safe. What happened to the crews suggests that those guidelines were wrong.The cannon blasts were strong enough to hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and each unleashed a shock wave that shot through the crew members’ bodies, vibrating bone, punching lungs and hearts, and whipping at cruise-missile speeds through the most delicate organ of all: the brain.More than a year after Marines started experiencing problems, the Marine Corps leadership tried to piece together what was happening by ordering a study of one of the hardest-hit units, Fox Battery, 2nd Battalion, 10th Marines.The research was limited to reviewing the troops’ medical records.

No Marines were examined or interviewed. Even so, the report, published in 2019, made a startling finding: The gun crews were being hurt by their own weapons.More than half the Marines in the battery had eventually received diagnoses of traumatic brain injuries, according to a briefing prepared for Marine Corps headquarters. The report warned that the experience in Syria showed that firing a high number of rounds, day after day, could incapacitate crews “faster than combat replacements can be trained to replace them.”The military did not seem to be taking the threat seriously, the briefing cautioned: Safety training — both for gun crews and medical personnel — was so deficient, it said, that the risks of repeated blast exposure “are seemingly ignored.”Despite the concerns raised in the report, no one appears to have warned the commanders responsible for the gun crews. And no one told the hundreds of troops who had fired the rounds.Instead, in case after case, the military treated the crews’ combat injuries as routine psychiatric disorders, if they treated them at all. Troops were told they had attention deficit disorder or depression. Many were given potent psychotropic drugs that made it hard to function and failed to provide much relief.Others who started acting strangely after the deployments were simply dismissed as problems, punished for misconduct and forced out of the military in punitive ways that cut them off from the veterans’ health care benefits that they now desperately need.The Marine Corps has never commented publicly on the findings of the study. It declined to say who ordered it or why and would not make the staff members who conducted it available for interviews. Officers who were in charge of the artillery batteries declined to comment for this article or did not respond to interview requests.The silence has left the affected veterans to try to figure out for themselves what is happening.Many never have.Powell, who was hearing things in his room, left the Marines and became a tow truck driver in Kentucky, but he kept having paralyzing panic attacks on the road. In 2018, a year and a half after returning from Syria, he shot himself.His neighbor in the barracks, Zipoy, moved back to his parents’ house in Minnesota and started college. In 2020, he began hearing voices and seeing hidden messages in street signs. A few days later, in the grips of a psychotic delusion, he entered a house he had never been in before and killed a man he had never met.When the police arrived, they found him wandering barefoot in the driveway. As they handcuffed him, he asked, “Are you going to take me to the moon?”He was found not guilty of murder by reason of mental illness in 2021 and was committed to a locked ward of the Minnesota Security Hospital. He is still there today.“Oh, my God, I was out of my mind. There was no understanding of what was happening,” he recalled in a recent interview from the hospital, rubbing his fists against his temples.“I’m angry, because I tried to get help in the Marines,” he said. “I knew something was wrong, but everybody just kind of blew it off.” Unclassifiable InjuriesWhen Ortiz started seeing a ghost a few days after returning from Syria in 2017, it didn’t occur to him that he had been hurt by his own cannon. Instead, he was convinced that the enemy had put a hex on him.He tried to purify himself by lighting a fire on the beach near Camp Pendleton and burning his old combat gloves and journal from the deployment. But after the ashes cooled, the ghost was still there.For the next four years, he tried to play down his problems and make a career in the Marine Corps. He started a family. He was promoted to sergeant. He received a diagnosis of PTSD and was given various medications, but his panic attacks and hallucinations persisted. He started to have problems with his heart and digestion, too.He eventually asked for a transfer to a special medical battalion set up to give Marines who are wounded in combat a place to recover.

But there was little in his record to suggest that he had seen combat or been wounded. His request was denied.One Friday night in October 2020, he was having visions that ghosts were trying to pull him into another dimension. He stretched out naked on his kitchen floor, hoping that the cool touch of the tiles would restore his grip on reality. It didn’t work. In a panic, he called a cousin who had served in Iraq. His cousin said that what always worked for his PTSD was marijuana.Ortiz bought some at a civilian dispensary. Although using marijuana is a crime in the military, he took a few puffs, relaxed and went to sleep.The next Monday, he admitted to his commanding officer what he had done. He apologized and told her that he had already referred himself to a Marine substance abuse program.The Marine Corps has regulations to ensure that Marines who break the rules because of PTSD or brain injuries are not punished for their missteps if their condition makes them unfit for duty. But records show that the Marine Corps decided Ortiz had no qualifying injuries.In 2021, he was forced out for willful misconduct and given an other-than-honorable discharge that cut him off from access to therapy, medication, disability payments and other support intended for wounded veterans.This spring, he and his family were squatting in a house in Kissimmee, Florida, that was going through foreclosure. The lights were off, and the kitchen sink was overflowing with dishes. He stammered as he tried to recount his experiences, with a memory he said is now full of blanks.He has two young children and has struggled to hold a job. Bills have piled up. The headaches are crushing, he said, and he feels that his memory is becoming worse. When asked about the apparition of the dead girl, he started to cry and lowered his voice so his wife wouldn’t hear. He admitted that he still saw the ghost — and other things.“I gave the Marine Corps everything,” he said. “And they spit me out with nothing. Damaged, damaged, very damaged.” Unseen Risks Firing weapons is as fundamental to military service as tackling is to football. And research has started to reveal that, as with hits in football, repeated blast exposure from firing heavy weapons like cannons, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets and even large-caliber machine guns may cause irreparable injury to the brain. It is a sprawling problem that the military is just starting to come to grips with.The science is still in its infancy, but evidence suggests that while individual blasts rippling through brain tissue may not cause obvious, lasting injury, repeated exposure appears to create scarring that eventually could cause neural connections to fail, according to Gary Kamimori, a senior Army blast researcher who retired recently after a career studying the problem.“Think of it like a rubber band,” he said. “Stretch a rubber band a hundred times, and it bounces back, but there are micro-tears forming. The hundred-and-first time, it breaks.”Those blasts might never cause a person to see stars or experience other signs of concussion, but over time, they may lead to sleeplessness, depression, anxiety and other symptoms that in many ways resemble PTSD, according to Dr. Daniel Perl, a neuropathologist who runs a Defense Department tissue bank that preserves dead veterans’ brains for research.“It’s common to mistake a blast injury in the brain for something else, because when you walk into a clinic, it looks like a lot of other things,” Perl said.His lab has examined samples from hundreds of deceased veterans who were exposed to enemy explosions and blasts from firing weapons during their military careers. The researchers found a unique and consistent pattern of microscopic scarring.Finding that pattern in living veterans is another matter. There is currently no brain scan or blood test that can detect the minute injuries, Perl said; the damage can be seen only under microscopes once a service member has died. So there is no definitive way to tell whether a living person is injured.

Even if there were, there is no therapy to fix it.The lab hasn’t examined any brains from artillery units sent to fight the Islamic State, but Perl said that he would not be surprised if many of them were affected. “You have a blast wave traveling at the speed of sound through the most complex and intricate organ in the body,” he said. “Wouldn’t you think there would be some damage?”The military for generations set maximum safe blast-exposure levels for eardrums and lungs but never for brains. Anything that didn’t leave troops dazed was generally considered safe. But that has recently changed.Over the past decade, veterans suffering from brain injurylike symptoms after years of firing weapons pressured Congress to rethink the potential dangers, and lawmakers passed a number of bills from 2018 to 2022 ordering the Pentagon to start a sprawling “Warfighter Brain Health Initiative” to try to measure blast exposure and develop protocols to protect troops.“There is an absolutely clear awareness this can be considered a brain health threat,” said Kathy Lee, director of casualty management for the Office of Health Affairs at the Defense Department, who oversees the initiative.In response to questions from the Times, both the Army and Marine Corps acknowledged that some gun crew members were injured by blasts during the fight against the Islamic State. In part because of that experience, the branches say they now have programs to track and limit crews’ exposure.But a Marine officer currently in charge of an artillery battery questioned whether that was accurate. He said recently that he has never seen or heard of the new safety guidelines and that nothing was being done to document his troops’ blast exposure.The officer, who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said he was experiencing splitting headaches and small seizures but was worried that his injuries would not be acknowledged because there was no documentation that he was ever exposed to anything dangerous.In short, he said, there is little in military regulations now that might stop what happened to the artillery troops in Syria and Iraq from happening again. A Secret Task Force Paradoxically, the point of sending artillery batteries to Syria was to avoid U.S. casualties.Islamic State fighters overran vast swaths of Syria and Iraq in 2014, taking over some of the region’s largest cities and using their self-proclaimed caliphate to organize attacks on civilian targets across the region and beyond. U.S. military planners knew they needed to confront the Islamic State but also knew that the American public was weary of long wars in the Middle East.Artillery offered a lot of bang with hardly any U.S. boots on the ground. A battery with four howitzers and about 100 troops could deliver a torrent of fire, day or night, in any weather. But keeping the troop count to a bare minimum meant there would be no relief shifts. Each battery would have to do the work of many.“The people running this war made a choice,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan O’Gorman, a Marine officer who oversaw artillery operations in the offensive and now teaches strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, “and choices have consequences.”Alpha battery troops set up their big guns in March 2017 in a dirt field in Syria within sight of the enemy-controlled city of Raqqa and almost immediately started firing. They rarely stopped for the next two months.Night and day, they hurled rounds, using some of the military’s most sophisticated cannons: M777A2 howitzers. The 35-foot-long guns had modern, precisely designed titanium parts and a digital targeting system, but when it came to protecting the crew, the design had changed little in a century. Gun crews still worked within arm’s reach of the barrel and fired the gun by pulling a simple cord.The resulting blast was several times louder than a jet taking off and unleashed a shock wave that hit the crews like a kick to the chest. Ears rang, bones

shivered, vision blurred as eyeballs momentarily compressed, and a ripple shot through every neuron in the brain like a whipcrack.“You feel it in your core. You feel it in your teeth,” said Carson Brown, a corporal from Idaho who pulled the firing cord for hundreds of shots. “It’s like it takes a year off your life.”The relentless firing was being driven by a small, top-secret Army Delta Force group called Task Force 9. President Donald Trump had given the task force broad authority to use heavy firepower, and the task force applied it with savage enthusiasm, often bending the rules to hit not just enemy positions but also mosques, schools, dams and power plants.Sometimes, artillery crew members said, the task force ordered them to fire in a grid pattern, not aiming at any specific target but simply hurling rounds toward Raqqa to keep the enemy on edge.The military’s Central Command, which oversaw the task force, did not respond to requests for comment.The demands of Task Force 9 led to rates of artillery fire not seen in generations.During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, artillery crews fired an average of 70 rounds during the entire six-week campaign, said John Grenier, a historian at the Army’s Field Artillery School. During the initial months of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, crews fired an average of 260 rounds. In Syria, each gun in Alpha battery shot more than 1,100 rounds in two months — most of them using high-powered charges that produce the strongest shock waves. Some guns in Fox battery, which replaced Alpha, fired about 10,000 rounds each.“It’s shocking, insane,” Grenier said.Under the relentless tempo, Marines would wake up feeling hung over and stagger to the guns like zombies. Their sense of taste changed. Some threw up. Crews grew irritable, and fights broke out.The symptoms were telltale signs of concussion but also what anyone might feel after a string of stressful 20-hour workdays in the desert, sleeping in foxholes and eating rations from plastic pouches. Medics came around daily to check on the crews but never intervened. And Marines trained to endure didn’t complain.A 20-year-old Marine from Missouri named Brandon Mooney was doing maintenance on his gun when he began to realize that he could no longer figure out how to put the pieces back together.“It got to a point where you knew the firing was affecting you, but what could you do? Refuse to do the mission?” he said in an interview.When he returned home, screening tests said he was fine, but he was tormented by anxiety, sleep paralysis and hallucinations of a black demon standing over his bed.After he left the Marine Corps, he became depressed and suicidal. He went to a veterans’ hospital for help. Although he never experienced anything he considered particularly traumatic in Syria, his nightmares and anxiety were diagnosed as PTSD.“From what, though?” he said in the interview. “I could never understand it.” Searching for Answers In the spring of 2017, two months after coming home from firing thousands of rounds in Iraq, Sgt. 1st Class Tyler Chatfield went missing in Kentucky.He was a senior soldier in Charlie Battery of the Army’s 1st Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment. The battery had fired a stunning number of rounds against the Islamic State and then returned to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in February 2017, just as the Marines were deploying.At Fort Campbell, soldiers were struggling to sleep and were stalked by hard-edged anxiety that sometimes veered into panic.Everyone was screened for PTSD and brain injury. The tests showed nothing unusual.Iraq was Chatfield’s third deployment, and his wife knew that homecomings could be rough, but this one seemed OK. He was relaxed, loving, engaged. He was coaching Little League and building a chicken coop in the backyard.Then one morning, he was at the gym, and his heart started racing like a jackrabbit. Cold sweat poured down his neck, and he started to vomit. He was sure he was having a heart attack. He was 26 years old.

His wife took him to the hospital, but other than some inflammation, cardiologists found nothing wrong. He went home and a few days later had another attack.Maybe it’s anxiety, a doctor suggested; he prescribed Xanax.Traumatic brain injuries can have profound effects on parts of the body that are nowhere near the skull, because the damage can cause communication with other organs to malfunction. Dozens of the young veterans interviewed by the Times said they now had elevated, irregular heartbeats and persistent, painful problems with their digestion.Chatfield never thought to mention the blasts he had endured to the doctors, his wife said. And the doctors didn’t ask.The next few days for the sergeant were quiet. He took his pills and rested. He roasted marshmallows in the backyard with his boys.Then he was gone. He wasn’t in bed when his wife woke up on the Thursday morning after the attack. He wasn’t at work, either. The Army and local police went out looking for him.His wife was sure he would show up to coach his sons’ afternoon baseball game. But in the ninth inning, she was still scanning the parking lot.She felt so uneasy by the end of the game that she asked another soldier to escort her home. The soldier went into the house first and emerged a few minutes later shaking his head. He had found Chatfield’s body in the garage, behind a stack of boxes. The sergeant had taken his own life.He left a short goodbye text but said nothing that shed light on his decision. The Army investigated but didn’t uncover anything that his wife, Janae’ Chatfield, felt could explain it.“None of it made any sense,” she said in an interview. “I don’t know why it happened. I don’t think I ever will.”All four of the artillery batteries examined by the Times have had at least one suicide — a striking pattern, since death by suicide is rare even in high-risk populations. Some batteries have had several, and many service members said in interviews that they had tried to kill themselves.A friend of Chatfield’s, Staff Sgt. Joshua James, changed from an easygoing young father into an alcoholic, afflicted by anxiety and headaches.He seemed to grow worse every year. In 2021, an MRI detected an abnormality deep in his brain, but doctors said they were not sure what caused it or what could be done. In November 2022, he was on a road trip with his family when he got into an argument with his wife. With no warning, he shot himself in the drive-thru of a fast-food restaurant.“The man who deployed never really came back,” Lindsey James, the sergeant’s wife, said in an interview at her home in Tennessee. “He was a different person. He never understood what was happening to him. I don’t think the Army did, either.” Damage at a Nano Scale The Defense Department has spent more than $1 billion in the past decade to research traumatic brain injury, but it still knows very little about what might have happened to the artillery crews. Nearly all of the research has focused on big explosions from roadside bombs and other enemy attacks, not the blast waves from the routine firing of weapons.Still, as that research progressed and studies tried to define the threshold at which an explosion caused brain damage, a growing amount of data suggested that the level was much lower than expected — so low, in fact, that it wasn’t much different from what troops experienced when they pulled the cord on an artillery cannon.In 2016, while the U.S. military was exposing gun crews in Iraq and Syria to repeated artillery blasts, a research team was doing something similar to lab mice at the University of Missouri.In a series of tests, the team placed mice a few feet from a lump of C4 explosive that was sized to produce a blast just above the military’s official safety level.After the blast, the mice were returned to their cages and started scampering around, apparently unaffected.“We were very disappointed. We didn’t see anything abnormal,” said Dr. Zezong Gu, who led the research.But the picture changed over the next few days.

Mice instinctively build nests, and researchers use the quality of their nests as a bench mark of well-being. The blasted mice built only ramshackle nests, often leaving them unfinished.In later experiments, blasted mice were put through mazes. They made more wrong turns than healthy mice and sometimes froze, refusing to explore the mazes at all.The team then dissected the animals’ brains. At first, they found almost no damage.“Everything looked fine until we looked at a nano scale,” Gu said.Under an electron microscope, a ravaged neural landscape came into focus. Sheaths of myelin, vital for insulating the biological wiring of the brain, hung in tatters. In key parts of the brain that control emotion and executive function, large numbers of mitochondria — the tiny powerhouses that provide energy for each cell — were dead.“It was remarkable. The damage was very widespread,” Gu said. “And that was just from one explosion.”Of course, the brains of mice and humans are very different. Dr. Scott Cota, a Navy captain and brain injury expert, said it was unclear whether the same damage would occur in human brains. Researchers can’t expose humans to damaging blasts and then dissect them the way they can mice, he said. And techniques are not yet available to detect microscopic trauma in living brains.“It’s very hard to study,” Cota said. “And unfortunately, we can only do it post-mortem at this point.” ‘Scared to Death’ The artillery gun crews present a rare and valuable chance to understand how blasts affect the brain, but no researchers are tracking them. It’s not clear if anyone in a position to learn from them is even aware that this unique group of combat veterans exists.Most of the crew members have drifted out of the military to corners of the country where they continue to quietly grapple with headaches, depression and confusion that they don’t understand.Two soldiers who worked side by side on the same gun under James and Chatfield have failed to find stability, even years later.Andrew Johnson, a tall, strong ammunition loader who stood right behind a cannon for thousands of shots, came home speaking with a noticeable delay, as if on a bad phone line. He was seeing flashes of light he couldn’t explain. He grew suspicious of fellow soldiers and stayed isolated in his room. A year after coming home, he tried to overdose with sleeping pills.“I can’t even remember what I was dealing with,” Johnson said in an interview in Jackson, Mississippi, where he now lives. “I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke. I had a girlfriend. But I just couldn’t function. I had this deep feeling of being all alone.”The Army started him on therapy for depression and gave him pills to help with nightmares.He was transferred to a new unit that knew nothing about his blast exposure in Iraq. He acquired a reputation for being unstable and was reprimanded for saying inappropriate things to other soldiers and shoving a medic. Last year, the Army forced him out for misconduct and gave him an other-than-honorable discharge.He got a string of jobs but lost them. He tried to go to school twice and failed. He went to a veterans’ hospital seeking help but was turned away because his discharge banned him from receiving care there.He is now homeless and sleeps in his car. Recently, he said, he attempted suicide again.Earlier this year, he started seeing things. Shadows cast by streetlights seemed to be crawling. At first, there were transient flickers of motion on the edge of his vision. Then came full hallucinations of creatures moving through the darkness.“Now they are very close, like at arm’s length, and very real,” he said in a phone call from his car one night. “Honestly, I see it right now, and it’s freaking me out.”Alex Sabol loaded charges right next to Johnson in Iraq. He had many advantages that Johnson never did. He was honorably discharged and given a monthly veterans’ pension. His family pays for a private psychotherapist. Even so, he has struggled.After the deployment, he felt as if his moods had gone feral.

The Army gave him a diagnosis of anxiety, depression, attention-deficit disorder and PTSD.“My friends, my family, I don’t think they understood why I couldn’t hold it together,” he said in an interview.He is now in college. He tries to eat well and exercise. On a spring morning, a pair of rock-climbing shoes hung by the door of the light-filled cabin where he lives in the Appalachian Mountains.But he has terrifying mood swings. Last year, he started punching himself. In autumn, he found himself in tears in his kitchen, in a pushup position hovering over a butcher knife, unsure why he had an overwhelming urge to plunge it into his heart.He is trying to move on from Iraq, but a lurking darkness keeps pulling him off course.This spring, he tried to hang himself. His girlfriend cut him down. She has since moved out.“I’m scared to death,” he said in an interview at his cabin. “I don’t want to die. And I don’t get why I get into those horrible places.”______If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.c.2023 The New York Times Company

0 notes

dasmuggler · 8 months

Text

A legend of Devil's Tower

Brule

Out of the plains of Wyoming rises Devil's Tower. It is really a rock, visible for hundreds of miles around, an immense cone of basalt which seems to touch the clouds. It sticks out of the flat prairie as if someone had pushed it up from underground.

Of course, Devil's Tower is a white man's name. We have no devil in our beliefs and got along well all these many centuries without him. You people invented the devil and, as far as I'm concerned, you can keep him. But everybody these days knows that towering rock by this name, so Devil's Tower it is.

No use telling you its Indian name. Most tribes call it bear rock. There is a reason for that - if you see it, you will notice on its sheer sides many, many streaks and gashes running straight up and down, like scratches made by giant claws.

Well, long, long ago, two young Indian boys found themselves lost in the prairie. You know how it is. They had played shinny ball and whacked it a few hundred yards out of the village. And then they had shot their toy bows still farther out into the sagebrush. And then they had heard a small animal make a noise and had gone to investigate.

They had come to a stream with many colorful pebbles and followed that for a while. They had come to a hill and wanted to see what was on the other side. On the other side they saw a herd of antelope and, of course, had to track them for a while.

When they got hungry and thought it was time to go home, the two boys found that they didn't know where they were. They started off in the direction where they thought their village was, but only got farther and farther away from it. At last they curled up beneath a tree and went to sleep.

They got up the next morning and walked some more, still headed the wrong way. They ate some wild berries and dug up wild turnips, found some chokecherries, and drank water from streams. For three days they walked toward the west. They were footsore, but they survived.

Oh, how they wished that their parents, or aunts or uncles, or elder brothers and sisters would find them. But nobody did.

On the fourth day the boys suddenly had a feeling that they were being followed. They looked around and in the distance saw Mato, the bear. This was no ordinary bear, but a giant grizzly so huge that the two boys would only make a small mouthful for him, but he had smelled the boys and wanted that mouthful. He kept coming close, and the earth trembled as he gathered speed.

The boys started running, looking for a place to hide, but there was no such place and the grizzly was much much faster than they. They stumbled, and the bear was almost upon them. They could see his red, wide-open jaws full of enormous, wicked teeth. They could smell his hot, evil breath. The boys were old enough to have learned to pray, and they called upon Wakan Tanka, the Creator:

"Tunkashila, Grandfather, have pity, save us."

All at once the earth shook and began to rise. The boys rose with it. Out of the earth came a cone of rock going up, up until it was more than a thousand feet high. And the boys were on top of it. Mato the bear was disappointed to see his meal disappearing into the clouds.

Have I said he was a giant bear? This grizzly was so huge that he could almost reach to the top of the rock, trying to get up, trying to get those boys. As he did so, he made big scratches in the sides of the towering rock. But the stone was too slippery; Mato could not get up. He tried every spot, every side. He scratched up the rock all around, but it was no use. The boys watched him wearing himself out, getting tired, giving up. They finally saw him going away, a huge, growling, grunting mountain of fur disappearing over the horizon.

The boys were saved. Or were they? How were they to get down? They were humans, not birds who could fly.

Some ten years ago, mountain climbers tried to conquer Devil's Tower. They had ropes, and iron hooks called pitons to nail themselves to the rockface, and they managed to get up. But they couldn't get down. They were marooned on that giant basalt cone, and they had to be taken off in a helicopter. In the long-ago days the Indians had no helicopters.

So how did the two boys get down? The legend does not tell us, but we can be sure that the Great Spirit didn't save those boys only to let them perish of hunger and thirst on the top of the rock.

Well, Wanblee, the eagle, has always been a friend to our people. So it must have been the eagle that let the boys grab hold of him and carried them safely back to their village.

Or do you know another way?

- Told by Lame Deer in Winner, Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation, South Dakota, 1969.

Note. Matȟó Thípila, Bear Lodge in Lakota

The Great Mystery Wakan Tanka

0 notes

xtruss · 9 months

Text

Hydrogen Is the Future—or a Complete Mirage!

The green-hydrogen industry is a case study in the potential—for better and worse—of our new economic era.

— July 14, 2023 | Foreign Policy | By Adam Tooze

An employee of Air Liquide in front of an electrolyzer at the company's future hydrogen production facility of renewable hydrogen in Oberhausen, Germany, on May 2, 2023. Ina Fassbender/ AFP Via Getty Images

For decades, economists warned of the dangers of trying through industrial policy to pick winners. The risk is not just that you might fail, but that in doing so you incur costs. You commit real resources that foreclose other options. The lesson was once that we should leave it to the market. But that was a recipe for a less urgent time. The climate crisis gives us no time. We cannot avoid the challenge of choosing our energy future. As Chuck Sabel and David Victor argue in their important new book Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World, it is through local partnership and experimentation that we are most likely to find answers to these technical dilemmas. But, as the case of hydrogen demonstrates, we must beware the efforts of powerful vested interests to use radical technological visions to channel us toward what are in fact conservative and ruinously expensive options.

A green hydrogen plant built by Spanish company Iberdrola in Puertollano, Spain, on April 18, 2023. Valentine Bontemps/AFP Via Getty Images

Technicians work on the construction of a hydrogen bus at a plant in Albi, France, on March 4, 2021. Georges Gobet/AFP Via Getty Images

Nevertheless, in the last six years a huge coalition of national governments and industrial interests has assembled around the promise of a hydrogen-based economy.

Looking at several key geographies in which hydrogen projects are currently being discussed offers a compound psychological portrait of the common moment of global uncertainty.

A worker at the Fukushima Hydrogen Energy Research Field, a test facility that produces hydrogen from renewable energy, in Fukushima, Japan, on Feb. 15, 2023. Richard A. Brooks/AFP Via Getty Images

CF Industries, the United States’ largest producer of ammonia, has finalized a deal to ship blue ammonia to Japan’s largest power utility for use alongside oil and gas in power generation. The CO2 storage that makes the ammonia blue rather than gray has been contracted between CF Industries and U.S. oil giant Exxon. A highly defensive strategy in Japan thus serves to provide a market for a conservative vision of the energy transition in the United Sates as well. Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco, by far the world’s largest oil company, is touting shipments of blue ammonia, which it hopes to deliver to Japan or East Asia. Though the cost in terms of energy content is the equivalent of around $250 per barrel of oil, Aramco hopes to ship 11 million tons of blue ammonia to world markets by 2030.

In the Netherlands, regions that have hitherto served as hubs for global natural gas trading are now competing for designation as Europe’s “hydrogen valley.” In June, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni inked the contract on the SoutH2 Corridor, a pipeline that will carry H2 up the Italian peninsula to Austria and southern Germany. Meanwhile, France has pushed Spain into agreeing to a subsea hydrogen connection rather than a natural gas pipeline over the Pyrenees. Spain and Portugal have ample LNG terminal capacity. But Spain’s solar and wind potential also make it Europe’s natural site for green hydrogen production and a “green hydrogen” pipe, regardless of its eventual uses, in the words of one commentator looks “less pharaonic and fossil-filled” than the original natural gas proposal.

A hydrogen-powered train is refilled by a mobile hydrogen filling station at the Siemens test site in Wegberg, Germany, on Sept. 9, 2022. Bernd/AFP Via Getty Images

Employees work on the assembly line of fuel cell electric vehicles powered by hydrogen at a factory in Qingdao, Shandong province, China, on March 29, 2022. VCG Via Getty Images

One is China, and specifically northern China and Inner Mongolia, where China currently concentrates a large part of its immense production of fertilizer, cement, and much of its steel industry. China is leading the world in the installation of solar and wind power and is pioneering ultra-high-voltage transmission. Unlike Japan and South Korea, China has shown no particular enthusiasm for hydrogen. It is placing the biggest bet in the world on the more direct route to electrification by way of renewable generation and batteries. But China is already the largest and lowest-cost producer of electrolysis equipment. In 2022, China launched a modestly proportioned hydrogen strategy. In cooperation with the United Nations it has initiated an experiment with green fertilizer production, and who would bet against its chances of establishing a large-scale hydrogen energy system?

— Adam Tooze is a Columnist at Foreign Policy and a History Professor and the Director of the European Institute at Columbia University. He is the Author of Chartbook, a newsletter on Rconomics, Geopolitics, and History.

1 note · View note