That toughness I mentioned earlier? Now he looks like he’s tough…
18 May 2007
Hey All,
As I write this letter, I can feel the effects of percocet start to slow my mind and hand. I am so sorry that there has been an absence of correspondence coming out of Fort Knox lately. I have my (hopefully) good reasons:
- Our screw-up platoon is finally getting lockdown treatment which means tough & demanding days for the next couple weeks.
- My bookman duties are keeping me very busy. The closer we get to graduation the more paperwork there is to finish.
- Drumroll… I broke my nose! Hence the reason percocet is almost keeping me from writing this letter.
I have a huge letter about all the weapons and tactics training that we did in the past couple weeks but with all this stuff happening… I think you better wait until I start AIT [Advanced Individual Training] on [Here, Sharpie’s writing becomes illegible, and a note says that he fell asleep here :)] June 4 before you get that letter.
I guess you probably want to know how I broke my nose. Well, it was an accident that happened on an obstacle course. On one of the stations we’re supposed to assist eachother up a multi-level structure in 4 man buddy teams. One man would stand on the lower level, grab the ledge of the next level up, hoist himself up feet first while men on top and bottom pull or push him up. Well I was one of the guys pulling on the second level and one of my battle buddies (that’s what we call eachother… kind of like calling Elder’s “companions”) swung his feet up faster than I though he was going to. His boot caught me square on the right side of my nose. It was a pretty bad break. My nose was offset about an inch to the left side of my face. Bleeding profusely, my drill sergeant pushed me to the emergency room where I spent the next few hours being treated. Then they had to take me in an ambulance to Elizabethtown to Hardin Memorial Hospital because they wanted to do a CT scan on my head just in case but the staff that knew how to run the machine had already gone home for the day. So I spent several hous at Hardin where they finally reset my nose with copious amounts of pulling, shoving, & crunching… ouch. It’s still slightly offset about an 1/8 of an inch to the left but I have another appt. on Tuesday with a nose specialist or something. Either he’ll fix it some more, or call it good and I’ll have a crooked nose for the rest of my life - a permanent reminder of my stay at the school of hard Knox. Any way I’m going to finish this & write more in my other letter about the upcoming 4 day field exercise. Don’t worry about me - I’m doing fine. But I could always use your prayers to keep me going and ensure that I graduate on time (these unforseen injuries can really screw up a private’s graduation plans if he gets hurt bad enough).
Well, write to you later.
PFC Christensen
