Close Calls
From the Mental Resilience Desk
Greg and I were relatively new pilots in the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior scout helicopter. He was a newly qualified pilot-in-command, and I was still a copilot. It was early 2002, wintertime, and we were in Kosovo conducting a night patrol. Two new pilots, ambitious, well trained, and set to task.
The green glow of our night vision goggles illuminated most of what we needed to see… but not everything. There are times and situations, like on a moonless overcast night, that not even night vision goggles seemed to help that much. When it was really dark, they actually begin to “scintillate” as we called it, and you’d start seeing something like the old after-hours television static or snow that would appear after the TV station you were watching would tune out for the night. (That was also back when they used to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” at night, just before the TV station would sign off -remember that?)
Scintillation was actually a relatively minor concern to us that night. Our patrols back then in Kosovo were to enforce a UN/NATO peacekeeping mission, and we were out looking for anything from illegal woodcutters and cigarette smugglers, to other foreign entities that were not playing by the rules. While Greg (name modified to protect his privacy) was doing the actual flying, I was “inside” the cockpit using our other technologies onboard to scan the area for anything that looked out of the ordinary.
Being in Kosovo, in addition to the other Eastern European destinations that we ventured to during this ordeal, really set my curiosity ablaze. Things were almost the same, but still decidedly different, like a parallel universe to explore. Beginner’s mind in real time! It seemed almost normal, but every time I turned around I would get this feeling of “that’s not quite right”, and I would have to adapt my understanding, actions, and perceptions based on everything that I encountered. It planted a seed, and ever since then I wanted to see more of this strange old parallel world… I was a fledgling nomad then, and I can trace my curiosity footsteps from my current wanders abroad back to my Balkan preamble of 2001-2002.
It was probably around 2AM. It was dark. We were tired. We decided to fly through a canyon as we investigated different obscurities that showed up on our sensors. We were low, below the surrounding ridge lines, and Greg very wisely turned on our forward-facing infrared landing light… a decision which very likely saved our lives that night…
Murmurs
In early 1972, in Southern California, my very young mother took me to a follow-up appointment at a hospital, probably in Riverside. I was a newborn, still brand new, and the staff there set about to ascertain if I was having any issues. There had been something going on with me, and there were some doubts over my general health. I don’t know if anything was going on with me in any acute or urgent way, but apparently there became a significant concern. “This baby has heart murmurs… BAD” they told my mother.
My mother describes me during this event as lying naked and cold on a stainless-steel examination table. I was screaming bloody murder amidst the forensic sterility of the clinic, with heart monitors attached, not being held by my mother. This was the immediate environment I was expressing extreme dissatisfaction with when the hospital staff concluded that my heart murmurs required open-heart surgery. Immediately.
Wired
Greg immediately pulled back on the cyclic (the “stick”, so to speak) for what was a sudden nose-up maneuver. I had been looking down at a terrain map, so it all happened very suddenly… on the way to us becoming quite nearly vertical, I vividly remember seeing a wire through the chin bubble as it passed out of sight. In our near-vertical position, Greg put full left pedal into it, which initiated what would have been an impromptu hammerhead turn just shy of the wire… we were then nose-low, and flying back away from the wire… it apparently spanned the width of the canyon.
Lucky for the two of us, Greg had the infrared landing light on, which illuminated the wire in time for him to see it and take immediate action. It was a sporty maneuver he skillfully performed to avoid hitting it. I think our lives had flashed before both of us in that cockpit just then.
We had dodged a bullet that night. Of course, anyone could argue that Greg and I had no business being that low in that relatively unknown canyon in the darkness of night, and they would have a strong point. It would have been wiser to remain higher… we both learned that lesson. We uneventfully finished the patrol, returning safely to Camp Bondsteel in the wee hours of the morning.
Greg and I both went on to log thousands of flight hours in the years that followed, safely (mostly).
Strong Hearts Prevail
Something instinctively told my young mother, as I lay freaking out on the cold examination table, all of about 3 months old, that her newborn son was simply about to become some new heart surgeon’s practice project. My mother politely told the staff that they could all respectfully pound sand. She collected her baby, and went home.
I dodged a bullet that day, thanks to my young instinctive mother. As it turns out, she learned, several of our family members had been born with heart murmurs… but we all grew out of them! I grew up with a heart that served me quite dandily, I might add, passing the scrutiny of military and civilian aeronautical flight physicals time after time throughout my adult life, ECG after ECG after ECG…
Nobody Makes it Out Alive
Many of us get pretty lucky at dodging bullets throughout our lives if we’re smart, discriminating, have good parents, possess resources, or are just plain lucky. But nobody dodges them forever. It was August of 2020 when I took the bullet with my name on it, quite literally a headshot. It came with a Parkinson’s diagnosis.
In this life, nobody makes it out alive. It’s not a matter of if we’ll catch a bullet, it’s when. If I hadn’t caught this one, my less-than-optimum fitness and diet very likely would have brought the reaper in a different boat later… but more suddenly. One thing I can’t get over is the rich, delicious irony that catching this Parkinson’s bullet when I did may have actually saved me from something worse downstream. Parkinson’s has cost me dearly in so many ways, but it may also be the “gift” that re-caged my gyros… and ended up prolonging my life.
As we grow, age, compensate, overcome, and suffer through the close calls, near misses, and brushes with fate, we may not bounce back completely, as I was able to do so many times until this. Consider the events in your own life which left you indelibly altered, mentally and emotionally transformed, or even scarred physically. Wasn’t it a matter of attitude, re-caging your gyros, or reinventing your perspective that eventually became your lifeboat? Sometimes we have to restart our journey altogether with just the faintest baby steps (Kübler-Ross’s famous stages of grief) and years of painful therapeutic intervention in order to emerge from these scenarios as new… courageous… functional people. Beginner’s Mind. Run towards it…
… and don’t look back. This is, of course, how we hold back the Leviathan.
This is the Nomadic Parkinson’s Dispatch.
Ultimately, the sixth state of grief—meaning.