The Unamendable Line

MFR 25 4471

THIRD REISSUE

SUBJECT: Vehicle survivability and medical case fatality, Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001 to 2017

FILED: 14 APR 25

REISSUED: 14 APR 25

Stamps, three of them, one over another, none of them mine. The clerk’s initials in the box at upper right. Below that the two dates that the program office puts on everything it sends down. They read 2021 and 2029. Eight years between them. The form does not ask me to explain the gap and I do not.

Access expires 2025. That line is not mine to change. Nothing on this page is going to be mine after that date.

In the right margin, in my hand, the first thing I find: the word detention in a heading where the word detention is correct, and so I have left it alone, and the correction I do make is a comma.

1. This report supersedes the second reissue, dated 09 SEP 24, in its entirety.

2. The second reissue is retained in the packet. It is not the record.

3. Annexes 2001 through 2006 are reissued at third reissue. Annex 2007 is struck in full.

Routing slip, second reissue, corner of page two, in other hands. Circled. Not a name. A disposition code. I have seen that code applied to nineteen documents in this packet and I have never once seen the person who wrote it, because a process has an office symbol and no motive, and it can be right or wrong in the same typeface either way.

What compliance did to my 2003 is small enough to describe in one sentence. There was a field in Annex 2003 for a figure. I wrote in that field that no figure was available. Second reissue replaced what I wrote with a baseline. It is a manufactured number. It is not a number anyone measured. It arrived already finished, already in the right font, and nobody had to be brave to make it.

Below the table, four lines that somebody printed in a first reissue, that I asked to have struck, and that were struck in the second reissue, but which the third reissue restored in the struck state, which is its own kind of promise. They read: the target is from ten to twenty times dimmer to a tracking sensor in geostationary orbit than it is to a sensor at lower altitude. Two sentences, struck twice, in two reissues. Over them, my correction, in my hand, and it is the same both times: the gap is not brightness. A boosting plume is brighter than the target and no one has ever lost one that way. The gap is altitude and minutes. From a sensor at that altitude and that range, for that many minutes, there is a hole in the sky where the vehicle is. Nobody knows it is a hole. They know only that the arc closes and the object stops arriving.

Also printed here, in other hands, in a table, with the citation in full: Howard JT, et al. Critical injury survival by injury severity score 25 to 75. Afghanistan 2.2 percent at onset rising to 39.9 percent. Iraq 8.9 percent at onset rising to 32.9 percent. Every figure on that line is true. Every figure has an author. Nobody in this document refers to them.

ANNEX 2003

Route: Haji Malek. Vehicle: M1114 HMMWV, 4-door.

14 JUN 03. Incident report attached. Casualty: SGT D. Ruiz, this command.

The field below is the field for a percentage. There is no percentage. The aid station on that route wrote what it wrote by hand, in pencil, on a form, at night, by a person who had other work. A provisional count of tourniquet use, 2.3 percent, is entered in the source record. It is a count of what somebody remembered to put on a form. It is not a rate. It is not comparable to anything in this annex and it will not be compared.

I have taken one quotation out of this annex and I am not going to put it back. I cannot source it and I will not carry an unsourced sentence in a document that will be read after I am gone by people who will assume it was sourced, and who will not check, because the reason it is in here is that I put it in here. That is the whole problem with a number you cannot trace. It is not that it is false. It is that it has a uniform on.

ANNEX 2004

Countermeasure assessment, 2011. Analyst: SGM E. Cruz.

Four hundred dollars for a jammer kit, and I will die on this. You can put a hundred and twenty watts of noise into a band and take a comms relay out of the sky for as long as the battery lasts, and the battery is the whole architecture. Every one of those receivers on that corridor is flying with no backup navigation, and a man who cannot be located cannot be tasked, and a task he cannot be called in on is a man who is not a soldier, he is a person holding a rifle in a place where people are also holding rifles. Four hundred dollars. Buy two and throw one away.

At the bottom, in my hand, the floor under the argument.

The surgical system that produced the fall in case fatality was assembled in Iraq in 2004. The Joint Theater Trauma System was developed there, that year, after the wounded began arriving. The Joint Trauma System was stood up in San Antonio in 2006. When the United States went into Afghanistan and in 2003 and into Iraq, it did not go with the system wide performance improvement capability of a modern trauma system. It did not have that on the day. People assembled it later, out of what came back, and the men who assembled it had it too late for the men who needed it first.

In that same year, 2004, I was certifying vehicles. This is not a comparison. It is two true things standing next to each other. It may not be merged.

ANNEX 2005

Ground clearance: 14 in, per DSIAC 2019, The JLTV Applies Lessons Learned in Underbody Blast Protection.

Fourteen inches, which is what the book says. I would have said a foot and a half, and I said it out loud to Ruiz before I wrote it down,

Occupant seating on this hull: two forward bucket seats, generic automotive, mounted to the floor. There is no energy attenuating stroke in the seat. There is no attenuating stroke in the floor. The occupant’s pelvis is the strongest single structure in his body and it is not attached to anything that absorbs, and so when the floor comes up it comes up through him and the rest of him goes on to the roof structure. The hull is thin and is prone to rupture even against a small charge, so the first thing into the footwell does not come from the side. It comes from underneath.

I certified this vehicle. I signed the form. I have signed eleven thousand of these and I remember that one for the fourteen inches.

Ruiz walked out of the aid station in September. He has two fused vertebrae and a cane he does not always use and twenty two years of service and he is alive.

The seat on this hull was never fixed. I want to be exact, because this is where the document stops being exact and becomes opinion. The seat was never fixed on this hull, and the fix was never coming to this hull, because the fix was a different class of vehicle. Energy attenuating seats, V hulls, plastic spall liners. That is MRAP and JLTV. That is a different vehicle, built later, at a different price, bought by people who were not buying mine. There was no date on which my vehicle received an improvement, and so there is no date on which it missed one, and so there is nothing to be angry at except fourteen inches and me, standing in a motor pool, saying a foot and a half, out loud, to a man who believed me.

He believed me. He did not check. That is the part I have to carry.

Current duty station, entered in my hand: Ruiz, D. Hospital, Wilton. One of two fields in this document I filled in myself. The other one is not in this annex.

The dark outside the vehicle is not dark. It is a kind of unlit. The instrument panel has been off for a long time. I have my left hand on the roof structure above my head because that is what I do, and it is not because of the roof structure, and I am not going to think about that tonight or any night.

I find it with the pad of my index finger against the inside of my thigh, on the crease, where the vein sits. I know it is there. I put the needle in with my right hand and I do not look, and the vein fills under the pad and I can feel the column go from nothing to something, which is a thing I have done maybe a thousand times and have never once been thanked for.

I hold it ninety seconds. That is not a figure. That is how long it took. A long time. And there is a boy on the field with both femurs gone above the knee, and he is a boy, he is nineteen, and his abdomen is open to the weather and the color of it is not a color I want to write down anywhere, and the men carrying him are not asking me anything, they are only moving, and I am the one who is not moving, and that is the correct distribution of work.

I have a hand on his neck. I have my thumb where the pulse is. I do not have a form. There is no form. There is no address on this. Nobody’s name goes in a box, nobody’s initials, no time, no grid, no case number, no this-is-not-the-thing-we-asked-about. If the whole thing were a document it would be the shortest one I have ever written and it would be blank.

He is telling me something. His eyes are open and he is looking at me and his mouth is doing a shape and I know the shape, it is the shape people make when they are saying a name, and I am not able to hear which one, and I hold him and I tell him I have him. Ninety seconds is longer than you would think it is. There is a bird noise somewhere off the field, and somebody’s radio, and a man counting out loud under his breath, and none of it comes near us. Then he is not looking at me anymore, and then the men are moving again.

There is a form for it and there is a field on the form and the field wants the order of things, and I have never had a step for it. I can tell you the two first seconds where I was certain, and I will, because the rest of it is weather and I have gone over that weather enough times now to know it is going to keep being weather. My hands I can describe as exactly as anybody would want, which is not the problem. Which is the whole problem, and it is not a reason anybody would accept on a form. If I write it down it stops being what happened to me on one afternoon and becomes a thing that can be done again, and a thing that can be done again is a procedure, and procedures get read by people who trust them, ten years on, in a vehicle I have never been in, and it will kill one of them, not because anybody made a mistake but because they will have done exactly what I did.

So it stays here. This is where it stays. It is not in Annex 2007, which is struck in full. It is not in the 2003. It is not in the 2011. It is not on this page anywhere, and it never will be, and the sentence I would need to describe it is not a sentence I have.

ANNEX 2019

Trauma readiness packet, garrison. Reviewing: SGM E. Cruz. Countersignature: CPT R. Okonjo.

The packet asks for a number. There is a field near the bottom labeled with a fraction and the denominator of that fraction is not printed, and I am not going to supply it, and when I am asked why I am not going to supply it I am going to give the reason that is in the file, which is that the field is incomplete as presented.

The true reason is 2011 and it has no address.

I can tell a twenty three year old captain what to write in a field. I can tell her what a denominator is, and why a rate without one is a smell, and what to do when a number arrives at her desk already multiplied. I can teach her every rule I have. And then I would have to tell her that the best thing I ever did did not come out of any of those rules, and that it cannot be given to her, and that the reason I am not going to tell her is that if I tell her, she will want it. She will spend her whole life trying to make a rule out of it, and every time somebody needs her to act with no form and no witness and no address, she will be standing there trying to decide whether what she has is a rule or a memory, and the trying will take her ninety seconds she should be spending on the vein.

So I withhold a signature from a twenty three year old over a blank field, and I let her think it is about her.

What she said, after, in the hallway, with the packet in her hands:

Yes ma’am. Is it my packet.

I said the packet is incomplete as presented. Which is true. I said it in the flat register of a woman reading a field back to the man who filled it in, and I have since wondered how many times I have said a true thing in that register.

She said, all right, and went to find somebody who would sign it, and somebody did, probably.

I have not written the field. It is in the third reissue the same as in the first, blank, with a line drawn for it.

ANNEX 2025

Corrections offered at third reissue.

I can correct the following and I have corrected them.

The two struck sentences about the target being ten to twenty times dimmer from geostationary orbit. Restored to struck state at third reissue, struck at second. The correction over them stands and is repeated here in my hand because a margin is a place a person can lose: the gap is not brightness. It is altitude and minutes.

The manufactured baseline in Annex 2003, which is not a measurement of anything and which replaced my statement that no figure was available. Restored to the original field. The count of what somebody remembered to write on a form is entered where it belongs, described as what it is.

The clearance, which was printed in compliance units and which I have expressed in compliance units, and which is the only number in this document I have no quarrel with at all, because a number in the units of the system that took the measurement is a number that carries its address.

That is the list. I have three items on it and I am going to stop at the third.

The next item is 2029. The next item is a date in a planning document, a schedule number in a file, put there by a program office that wrote it down because offices write down the date they intend. GAO 22 105075, 2022, records that the program office’s own FY2021 planning documents indicated that the current phase of the effort would target a formal operational release of the capability to warfighters, and that the office later backed away from that goal. The paper kept the date. Nobody retracts a date. A date in a file is not a claim about the world. It is a claim about a person, and the person is not me, and I have no standing, and correcting it would be a man pointing at a number in another man’s file.

And the other ones. The ones in the table in the second reissue, with the authors on them. Those are true. They are sourced. They went from 2.2 percent to 39.9 percent over sixteen years in Afghanistan and from 8.9 to 32.9 in Iraq, and a tourniquet went from 2.3 percent to 16.9, and blood from 4.4 to 10.8, and every one of those numbers has a person who measured it and wrote it down, and I cannot do the one thing a document is for. I cannot put a body count under them. There is no figure for the people whose information I have because the people whose information it would be are the ones nobody wrote down.

I know exactly what the two true things are and I know they are not the same comparison, and I have written that in the 2004, and I will not put them in the same column, and I will not put a line under them either, because a line under two columns is a reader doing arithmetic, and the reader will do it anyway, and the reader will be right, and the reader will be the first person in this document to write down a number about Ruiz that nobody measured.

I have three items and I am keeping three.

ANNEX 2025 RESIDENT

WT only. SGM E. Cruz, terminal date 2025.

Okonjo is the resident here now, six years on. She came in at twenty nine. She is tired in the specific way of a person who has been on the receiving end of a form that is wrong in a small way, for a long time, by somebody who was not thinking about her.

She is holding the 2005. She has been holding it for a while, and she has it folded, and she has it folded wrong, the crease run through the printed seal.

She asks me something else.

When you were twenty nine. Did anybody put their name on it for you.

I have to be fair to her. She is asking, and there is a person standing in front of me, and the question is not about the annex. It is not about the 2005 or the 2019 or 2011. It is late by six years, and it has been in the packet the whole time in the same typeface as everything else, and I hear it now.

No.

Then she looks at the annex, and she looks at the floor where the annex is signed, and she asks whether she should countersign the third reissue, and I give her the page.

It goes back to the front. It is a form with a disposition box on it, the only disposition box on the sheet, and the disposition box has been empty since the ninth of September six years ago, six years of routing and second reissues and stamps, and her name is in the routing line and the date is in the box and everything above the box is a document and everything below the box is a document, and there is a pen on the table.

I put the pen in her hand because she will not reach for it, and I do it without ceremony, the way I have watched people do it a thousand times, not looking at her, looking at the chart on the wall, at nothing.

The field under that disposition line is the one that has been blank since 2019. The packet is on the truck at 1600, in the pouch, flat, on top, where nothing will fold it.