First Contact with the Marines

There was a long wait before anything happened.  We would occasionally be told that they were on their way, and get all the cameras turned on and ready.  And then 15 minutes later we would hear that was a false alarm and that they still hadn’t left the ship yet.  I eventually had to go down to the staging room to setup a battery charging station because of how much power we had expended on those false alarms.  But finally we heard the rotors in the distance.  The first group arrived on a V-22 Osprey, and circled once before tilting its wings and rotors upward, and landing vertically on the soccer field.  The first 40 marines jumped out and formed a perimeter around the LZ.  The V-22 took back off, and then nothing happened for about ten minutes.  I could see them talking and pointing at things, and a couple of marksmen clearly had their sights on me.  They probably took the approach that if I did anything aggressive they could take me out, minimizing that potential threat.

 

It turns out they were just waiting for reinforcements, and we soon heard a second V-22 approaching.  It landed in the same spot, and 40 more Marines got out as I got some great shots.  We were all pretty fixated on it as it took off again, when I looked around and realized that the first group had just disbursed into the town.  I was quick to point that out on the radio, and a couple of our operators had already noticed, but the rest hurried to catch up.  The next fifteen minutes were fairly interesting, as squads of marines moved through the streets and secured the town.  I pointed out when things were happening that we might be missing, and got a few overhead shots when I could.  The rest of the Marines landed in a CH-53E Super Stallion, and setup a casualty processing area near the field.

 

They eventually started interacting with the actors around the blast site that had been setup.  Their Navy corpsmen began treating the wounded, and the officers began conversing with the actors, who were playing local leaders and witnesses, and a Navy EOD team went in to deal with the second suicide vest.  They dragged it halfway down the street and then proceeded to “disarm” it.  But this all took another hour, and was actually a very slow process to observe.  Eventually as the action slowed down, there started to be discussion on the radio about conserving camera batteries and card space.  Once the Marines withdrew back toward the soccer field, I headed down and began processing the first batch of cards that the camera department had collected.

 

We eventually learned that it had become too windy to operate the V-22s, so they were waiting for the helicopter to ferry them all back in three trips.  That ended up taking a few hours, long waits, punctuated by a few minutes of action when a helicopter landed and took off.  I was pretty much caught up with the data backups by the time the last group left, well after dark.  I had the last of the cards copied by the time the crew was finished breaking down our gear.  On the drive back to the hotel, I got to listen to the discussion of changes to be made before the next operation.  We weren’t the Marines in training, who were supposed to be ready for anything.  We needed to know exactly when the assault was expected to arrive, so we weren’t wasting resources during every false start.  And we needed to know what we were expecting to actually happen, in order to be prepared to properly record it.  I ended up getting a call from McCoy at like 4am that night, looking for keys to get something out of the car, which was quite a way to end a very long day.

Welcome to Winter

I flew out of LA in early December, and on descent into my layover at ATL, I was startled to hear “We’ll be landing on time in Atlanta, where the outside temperature is 17 degrees.”  Oh yeah, it’s winter in the rest of the country!  After months of shooting in the humid swamps and hot deserts, I hardly had long pants with me, let alone a decent jacket.  So the walk across the tarmac to my puddle jumper to Wilmington was REAL cold.  And it was strange for it to be that cold without any snow on the ground.  Hana was coordinating the production, and picked me up from the airport that night.  My first priority the next morning was a trip to Dick’s Sporting Goods, to buy warmer clothes.  I bought what I anticipated to be two full sets of cold weather gear to alternate between.  In reality I usually ended up wearing all of them layered on top of each other, since it was usually about twenty degrees out with a stiff wind coming off the ocean.  The first day was just prep at the hotel, and distributing gear to the crews that were going to spend the next two weeks on ships sitting off the coast.  I was informed I was going to be one of the drivers, and all of us were sent to the base to get permits and clearances.

 

The next day I was handed a radio and the keys to a Suburban, and I led the caravan of fifteen production vehicles to Camp Lejeune.  I was driving McCoy, who was directing the production, as well as Jeff the executive producer.  Once we got on base, we followed the military liaison around in circles as he tried to figure out where we were supposed to be.  During this time, the Marines were using our caravan for targeting practice for their attack helicopters.  It is a bit unsettling to look in the mirror and see a Cobra helicopter tracking you.  We finally got to the correct training area, which was quite amusing to see.  It was clearly designed to be an Eastern European village, constructed during the cold war.  But as times had changed, it had all been painted sand brown and had Arabic writing everywhere.  We piled out of the vehicles and began setting up.  I put my laptop and hard drives in one of the buildings we were staging in, and helped unpack the camera gear.  Shortly after that, a large group of people arrived, who were locals hired by the military to be extra civilians.  Some of them were actors, who actually had roles to play in the unfolding scenario.  The scenario had not been made clear to the crew ahead of time, but involved surveying the aftermath of a suicide bomber, and disposing of a second explosive device found in the village.  There would be a full company of marines dropping in from the ship off the coast.

 

After scouting around with McCoy a bit, I pointed out that our guys could get lost in the streets, and miss some of the action, since the place was so big.  I recommended putting someone in the top of the church steeple to keep an eye on things, and direct camera crews to the action.  He pointed out that if someone was there, they should also have a camera to get shots, and requested a 600mm lens be sent up there on a camera.  Then I was unexpectedly given that role.  Usually I received data cards from the camera crews during the shoot, to be offloaded and reused.  So being located at the top of a six story stair case didn’t seem ideal for that role.  But they decided that the shoot should be short enough that they wouldn’t copy the footage until it was all over.  So I had my first role as a camera operator.

Home for Thanksgiving

After I had a few days to unpack from the trip, and get our footage processed at the office, I was headed home for Thanksgiving.  I arranged to carpool with H to save gas, since we our schedules aligned.  We left late Tuesday night, and arrived well after midnight.  She provided the car, so I provided the driving, and she slept most of the way.  My parents still had my old car, so I had a vehicle to use for the next four days.

 

Even though my parents were living apart, the plan was to celebrate the holidays together.  My mom wanted us to all go to the fairgrounds for Thanksgiving, to attend the large community meal that I used to work at as a Boy Scout.  So my dad reluctantly agreed to forego the usually feast at our house.  On the day of, my mom canceled for some reason, so it ended up being the rest of the family meeting there, none of whom had any interest in being there.  Unfortunately the event had declined in the years since I had worked at it, and was even worse than I remembered.  So no one was real happy, and it was a pretty rough day all around.

 

The next day I connected up with Rockstar, to hear his perspective on the events surrounding his wedding.  We had a six hour talk about all sorts of things, but it was a really good one.  I found it very interesting to compare the stories.  They agreed on all of the actual facts of the matter, and the events that took place.  But they still told totally different stories, and had very different views and analysis.  I felt a whole lot better after hearing the other side of the story, concluding that conflicts like that don’t just strike at random, they occur as a result of the decisions made by the people involved.  And therefore I didn’t necessarily have to go around concerned that something like that might happen to me, at some point in the future, without any prior warning.

 

The drive home with H was a bit tense at times, and I don’t pretend to understand girls, or what causes that.  That next week, D came up to check out my Bible study.  I had been offering up the fairly anonymous prayer request there that two of my friends were having some major relationship issues to deal with.  So when the topic came up, I was giving a quick update when I realized that it wasn’t anonymous in front of D, who was going to have been the maid of honor at the wedding.  It was one of those strange awkward moments where you stop mid sentence and re-evaluate things before continuing.  But it ended up being perfectly fine, and she even added a few details when we paired off to pray together.

 

When I got back to the office, I discovered that we had gotten a contract with the Marines to do a major shoot for two weeks in December.  It would involve four separate crews filming six amphibious assaults with twenty four cameras on two ships and four bases on the East Coast.  I would be on one of the land based crews, but oversee the footage and data for all of the crews in the operation.  I came up with a new creative way to organize the footage from that many cameras, and setup a new logging system.  I had done all of my onset work for the SEAL movie on my own volition, without any extra pay over my normal office salary.  But this was different, and I knew the time and stress involved, and now had the experience to justify a full position on the crew, including the usual pay.  But inquiries about how my company wanted to handle that were put off until my return.

Towing a Trailer in the Desert

Once we finished in El Centro, we drove up to Lake Havasu for a day, and then the last day of the shoot was out in the desert above Baker.  I had my roommate along to help with the drive for those two legs of the trip.  At one point, I was getting low on gas when we approached the only buildings for miles, at the intersection of two highways.  I pointed out that we would need to stop for gas, but we had to get through the agricultural inspection checkpoint first.  That is a bit nerve racking, because they seem to ask you a lot more questions when you are towing a trailer.  Once we had gotten through that, and I had made the turn onto the new highway, Shaun reminded me about gas, right after we had passed the entrance to the gas station.  I took a quick look around, but there was no other way to get into it, and there were cars behind us.  So I continued ahead, hoping for a place to turn around.  But the road was graded above the desert floor, and it would be a foot drop to go over the side, and I couldn’t pull a U-turn with the trailer, especially with semi trucks blowing by in the other direction every thirty seconds.

 

The next gas station was in Needles, about thirty miles ahead.  My truck told me I had 20 miles of range left, and I didn’t know if that compensated for the 7MPG I had been getting while towing the trailer.  So we had to continue onward, and I was just praying that the tank had some reserve fuel available.  The first 15 miles was flat as a board, but a constant slightly uphill grade, that felt like it was sucking up gas.  The top was visible the whole time, but felt like it would never come.  Eventually we reached the summit, and I felt a bit more comfortable now that we were heading down hill.  We breathed a sigh of relief when we saw the Needles City Limit sign, only to discover it was another seven miles before we saw our first building.  We eventually made it to a gas station, and it took two transactions, and $130 to fill the tank with 32 gallons of gas.  I have never put in more than 25 gallons before or since, and have run out of gas on less than that since then, not that I am complaining about how it worked out.

 

That night we stayed at Stateline, and headed out into the desert the next day.  Our “set” that day was a barren stretch of desert in the middle of nowhere.  One of our actors arrived in a taxi from LA.  I don’t want to know how much that four hour cab ride must have cost.  We had two cargo planes land there for the scene, and got the shots we needed.  One of the planes was based in Santa Monica, and took most of the cast and crew back to LA when it left.  After take off, it did a low pass over the production trailer camp.  I saw out the window that it was aiming right for us, but I only heard it fly over as I ran out of my trailer.  I was told by others that the large plane cleared my trailer by “about ten feet.”  I guess the stunt pilot enjoyed watching everyone dive for cover.

 

My roommate was one of the people on that flight out, so I had lost my co-pilot for the trek home, through the heart of LA with my trailer on a Friday night.  The first step was to get gas, and I nearly got stuck in the station as I worked myself farther into a corner.  I took a deep breath, said a little prayer, and then finally managed to back it out of the corner, and right to the pump in a single shot.  Once that was over, I just had to get through LA, in construction traffic on Interstate 10 all the way to Culver City, and made it to the office without further incident.  But I had had enough trailer driving for a while.

Breaking in my Trailer

I was soon preparing to take my trailer on its first real excursion.  I was looking forward to having more space to work, a powerful workstation under my desk, and better monitors to use to view the footage on.  I was a bit apprehensive about towing my trailer straight through downtown on the busiest freeway in LA on my first trip.  But once we got out of town, driving in the desert seemed to be idea conditions for getting acclimated to towing it.  I had one of the guys on the camera crew join me as a copilot/navigator for that first leg of the journey, and we didn’t have any significant problems.  Once I got on the freeway, I just didn’t stop until I was well outside the city.  It was about five hours to get to El Centro, where we would spend the next ten days.  I dropped off the trailer near the set, and headed to the hotel.  They were having another budget overhaul, and they decided to return the production office trailer to save money.  I had brought my trailer on my own and wasn’t planning to charge them for this first experiment with it.  But when Haggart proposed moving the whole production staff into my little trailer, he promised that they would pay me for it.

 

So while some of the production managers worked out of their hotel rooms, for the rest of that shoot I had at least ten people working in very tight quarters in my 24’ trailer.  There were usually two or three of us sharing the back desk, four people working at the dining table, and three more using their laptops on the couch.  Occasionally there would be more people sitting on the front bed.  The first two days it was like a solar oven in there, in the 115 degree heat outside.  Until I moved the trailer into a spot that was shaded by a large building, and then I had the only spot on set with air conditioning.  And since that was where footage was being reviewed, it was a pretty popular place for people to be.  And since this shooting location was the closest big one to LA, various members of the post-production and support staff came out from the office to visit the set, basing out of my trailer as well.  Ironically I ended up charging the production more for the use of my trailer than they saved by canceling the rental of the much larger fifth-wheel production office trailer, which is exactly what the production crew prompted me to do.  It came to $300 a day, which was a reasonable number for a piece of equipment like that.

Back Up North

I had arranged to make a trip north for my Mom’s birthday, when they rescheduled the next shoot for the movie, this time in San Diego.  There was some confusion over whether I was supposed to go, but I eventually declined, in favor of my first trip back home since that summer.

 

I hadn’t talked to P since I left camp that summer.  I hadn’t gone out of my way to resume our dialog online, and thought that maybe decreasing our level of communication would help me align my emotions toward her with the type of relationship she wanted us to have.  I can’t really say that worked, but it was worth a try.  At the end of my journey north, as I was driving into town, I passed her on the freeway.  It was the first time I had ever seen her anywhere besides at camp.  Once I realized it was her, I had a totally different perspective on my approach the last few months.  It felt like I had been running from the issue, which is something I usually pride myself on not doing.  It was not like our paths weren’t going to cross.  We were from the same small town, knew a lot of the same people, and she even lived at the camp I dreamed of moving to.  It wasn’t like not talking to her was going to improve things.  So that incident prompted me to resume our conversation, and I made a point of seeing her when I went to visit all my friends out at camp that week.

 

I stopped by camp one afternoon that week, and spent a few hours helping Sunshine clean all the windows and screens in the lodge, while she gave me a detailed story of the circumstances surrounding her aborted wedding.  Her perspective on the events led me to question how one could ever try to get married if something like that could randomly happen at the last minute.  She also suggested I look up D, a mutual friend who now lived down near me.  After that, I headed over to talk with P for a few minutes, and then up to Wild Oak, to hang out with Buddies, Eclipse, and Doodles for the evening.  Camp was not in session that week, so it felt very dead there, and didn’t have the vibe that I was accustomed to during the summer.

 

We celebrated my Mom’s birthday, and then I headed back down south, to be ready to receive footage in the office from the shoot in San Diego.  Our next shot was going to be two weeks out in the desert in Southern California, so I would finally get a chance to take advantage of the trailer that I had built.

Shortly after I got back, I connected up with D, and joined her and her friends at a movie down in Long Beach.  It was good to see a friendly face in LA, and I hadn’t seen her in nearly a year.  About that time, a newly married couple joined our Bible study in LA.  Greg and Jen had an interesting story about how they had ended up together, that shifted my mindset a bit.  They had worked in the same ministry together at UCLA, and commuted together every week to volunteer at some location in downtown LA.  He told us he had been trying to get her to date him that whole year.  She had declined every time, and they were just friends.  It wasn’t until the next semester that she finally changed her mind, and agreed to give it a try.  Her perspective was that she wasn’t ready then, but eventually she came around, and a year later, there they were.  It was an interesting story about how initial repeated rejection eventually had a happy ending.

Dealing with MRSA

The next morning I woke up to discover that the infection had spread to my face.  I had a huge lump on my neck, and my upper lip was incredibly swollen.  I went straight to the doctor’s office.  Kaiser has a policy about not usually making same day appointments, but I just walked up to my doctor’s section of the hospital, went up to the registration window, and said: “I don’t have an appointment, but the doctor took me off my medication yesterday, and I woke up looking like this!”  “Oh!  The doctor will see you; just give us a few minutes.”  I paid the regular $110, and I soon found myself waiting in an examination room.  After a few minutes the doctor walked in.  He just stood there looking at me for about fifteen seconds, then said “Well, that was a bad judgment call,” and then turned around and left.  I sat there waiting another fifteen minutes before he returned.  “I’ve been up on the fourth floor talking with the Head Neck and Throat department, and they are going to see you right away to take care of that.  And then we have a new medication for you to try out.

 

So I went up there, registered and paid again, and was taken in for what I guess is called outpatient surgery.  After my experience in the Navy infirmary, I was a bit apprehensive about what was coming next.  But they gave me some localized anesthetic, and I hardly felt what they were doing.  They slit my lip open, drained the wound, and cleaned up the infection.  They didn’t do much with my neck, although they did examine it a little bit.  When I left, I expected to look like Frankenstein, but when I stopped in the bathroom, I was surprised that you could hardly see any evidence of what my lip had looked like an hour before.

 

I went down to the pharmacy to pick up my new prescription, and was pretty surprised at how much it was going to cost.  The amount they wanted was more than my annual deductible, regardless of the fact that I had spent quite a bit of money at the hospital the last few weeks, and even twice earlier that morning.  They acknowledged that it was clearly a mistake, but that I would be refunded the difference once the paperwork was processed.  This ended up taking over six months, and they over-refunded me, leading to months more phone calls and frustration, to get it balanced out.  The new drug they gave me was Zyvox, and the bottle said it was Batch #002.  I started taking it immediately, and by the next day, it had totally killed the infection.  I still had to cut the dead material out of my neck on my own.  But things improved dramatically from that point forward, and I finished out the prescription.