Shock Treatment

It's turning out to be one long week! Here it is Wednesday, feeling half-alive, still searching for a car. I'm not in a hurry- whatever will happen will happen. No Mustang, says Tabatha, my better half. They turn men into instant assholes, pardon my language. I had to laugh a little at that, thinking it was funny. Whether it's true or not, I don't know. My thoughts run like this- evidently the equation is horsepower plus guy equals big ego, leading to drives like a jackass on meth. Okay, so let's extrapolate a little- we have two parts to this equation- power and then ego, which in turn leads to strung out donkey, and so forth. Consider, however- I drive a truck with a Detroit diesel engine about the size of my kitchen- here we have horsepower. In any practical situation (and a few impractical ones) said Detroit diesel is tricked out with machine guns- here we have horsepower and firepower. See where I'm going with this? In this case, no driving like said druggie farm animal. Rather, know fully well what your vehicle is capable of doing, as well as not doing, like weighing 14 tons and not being exactly able to stop on a dime. I'm pretty sure this is kind of the ultimate 'guy' vehicle. George Romero fans will perhaps remember Land of The Dead, with the incomparable John Leguizamo piloting a vehicle called Dead Reckoning- take off the snazzy paint job and a couple feet of chassis length and you've pretty much got my ride. Driving this any other way than tight and neat is liable to do two things- get someone hurt or get you in a world of hurt.
But I digress. Today it stormed with great enthusiasm, which was a lot of fun. I love thunderstorms, and Oklahoma has some epic ones. One of the trucks, (the same kind as mine, ammo/cargo HEMTTs) blew a starter motor somehow, so it's kind of dead in the water until we can replace the part. The problem seemed to be that the starter motor never disengaged when the truck was running- whoops! Internal combustion engines have electric starters- remember in old movies, where the driver gets out and sticks a crank in the front of the car to start it? The electric starter pretty much did away with the need for these. It in essence turns the crank for you- this is why your car won't start with a dead battery, but will start after you jump it- the battery will recharge off of your gasoline engine, but the starter motor needs that initial battery charge to turn the engine over in the first place. Of course, that electric motor isn't designed to keep running- once it does its job, it goes back off and sits quietly until the next time it's needed.. Except in this case, where it was trying to keep up with the diesel engine that was moving the truck, and running much faster than the starter motor could have. So the result was that the starter overloaded and went out. We determined this first by opening the engine manifold and getting a stink of ozone, and also because all the other electrical components and wiring are completely intact and functional.

The day progressed on, bringing us up to the afternoon. I was on an armory detail- the armory being the big secure vault where we keep lots and lots of weapons. (Yes, collapsible buttstock time again). We had to run 40 rifles over to a neighboring motor pool, as they had a tool we ourselves did not for switching out the rifle components. So we loaded up a Humvee and headed over there. We got the rifles unloaded, partially disassembled, then reassembled and loaded, all the while listening to the rain and thunder just outside. Rifles secured and retrofitted, we all jumped back into our Humvee, out of the torrential rain, and cranked the engine. No luck, it wouldn't turn over. Figures. We tried again- rien. So we realized we'd have to "jump the bastard", as my armorer so adroitly put it. All military vehicles are equipped with a special port that allows us to do just that- called a slave port, we use big chunky cables to connect to a functioning vehicle and jump the battery. Humvees being no exception, we found a nearby vehicle, and I got to go running around in the rain, dragging a cable that weighed more than I did and getting thoroughly drenched in the process. I plugged the cable into the donor vehicle's port, while someone else held the other end, staying dry in our disabled vehicle, waiting for my thumbs-up to plug into our port and hopefully get the thing running. I plugged it in and looked over- at our vehicle now running! Somehow it decided to start after the driver cranked it over one more time. Of course, by this point I was soaked to the skin, and the other guy was holding the other end of the cable, conspicuously not plugged in, and laughing like a loon. I took in the situation myself, and just about fell on my soaked rear end laughing too. Truly a comedy of errors, this. So back to our own motor pool we went, threw out the excess packing material we had accumulated, and called it a day. We then offloaded our newly equipped weapons, locked up the arms vault, and tried to dry off a little bit. At least we had an exciting time, watching the tracer rounds go flying off in all directions from a nearby machine gun range.

Whatever happens from here on out, well, that was a moment in time- like so many others, in some odd way giving me the sense that it's all going to work out in the end, and this existence isn't quite as futile as sometimes we might think.