Primates are a fascinating species.  Although they lack our intellect they make up for it in their nimble abilities.  They seem to display emotions, which are as developed as ours and they even have a social structure.  Thought it will never be as complex as humans, it suites their environment all to well.  Within their environment it seems they have many of the things we treasure as humans such as family and community.  Primates seem to just be, born and raised in a completely natural environment.  With a complete range of emotions and a moderate sense of thought, they survive in a seemingly harsh world.  Primates live off the land, hardly leaving a trace of their presents.  It appears as though they are naive and ignorant of the world around them.  There society is a small harmonious group.  They travel, feed, and look out for each other.  In actuality it seems it’s an infantile form of communism, and in this case it could be said they have a system of government.  That’s quite a feat for an animal with limited intelligence.

Fear

     Receiving and injection is completely unbearable.  I don’t have a problem with the discomfort caused by it.  It’s the idea of a foreign body being lodged in between my cells, splitting them apart and penetrating into the deep tissues of my arm.  I can’t look when they put it in, but my imagination runs wild when I feel the cold shaft of the needle entering my flesh.  The smell of the alcohol really gives me an uneasy feeling in my stomach and causes my heart to race.  The correlation between the needle and the smell of alcohol increases the anxiety I feel.  Unfortunately, I’m in the military and receive vaccinations for all kinds of things.  Many like this one are a series of shots from two to three in a certain schedule.  So I am forced yearly to be subjected to my fears.  There is no escaping it.  

The call came in. My heart stopped. The officer I sent to assist my Flight Chief, on a routine DUI, radioed upon his arrival that the on scene officer was down and the suspect vehicle was speeding away. Seconds felt like hours and through the night the hour's days. The time between the adrenaline-backed call till I telephoned the hospital was infinite. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. I had handled multiple incidences with ease but now there was just one. The assisting officer shattered my belief that he was going to be ok when he radioed that he sustained a gunshot wound. I was now in charged with the duty of capturing the suspect and preventing this assailant from doing any more harm. At the age of 22 I was responsible for what seemed to be the world. The shift supervisor was down and I was left to coordinate everything. I worked 20 hours that night, running on pure adrenaline. Most of the night I moved and commanded on instinct alone, doing what I was trained to do. But at the end when it was all said and done I thought about my friends, the one slain during a routine traffic stop and the other who responded and had witnessed the events that would scar us for a lifetime.

Darkness is all encompassing within these walls.  Walls constructed in thin pine boards in a dimension that barely allow one to take breath.  Breath that would supply only damp putrid air and the foul stench of for to the breast.  There is no escape for there are no doors or windows only cracks between boards, which allow only dirt to sift through and fall upon the face.  The same dirt blocks all sound from traveling to you and silences your screams from the outside world.  Alone you lie with no chance of leaving you eternal resting place.  A place where you lay in solitude only to rethink thoughts over and over again and to replay the past until they become the present again.  This is a place where the end becomes the beginning.

In order to comprehend how a vehicle is airdropped from a C-130 the process needs to be understood.  It starts with the vehicle, a jeep for instance, being rigged to a platform where it is strapped down and the chutes and harnesses are attached.  The platform is then loaded into the aircraft in such a way that it does not affect the aircrafts center of balance.  A sixty-foot extraction line is attached to the platform as well as the extraction chutes.  The extraction chute is attached to a bomb rack suspended over the aircrafts ramp.  During flight when the drop is initiated the extraction chute falls from the rack and into the slipstream outside the aircraft.  The extraction chute pulls the extraction line out of the aircraft and opens up.   The tension caused by they loaded chute pulled behind the aircraft pulls the platform out of the aircraft.  The extraction line separates from the platform as it exits and pulls the bags off the chutes allowing them to fill with air.  This is where the platform goes from the extraction phase to the deployment phase.  The filled chutes allow the platform to fall safely to the ground.