Less than ten minutes later, Dan pulled the chosen Swiss pattern file out of the boiling water, using a huge pair of obstetrics forceps to reach down to the bottom of the stainless steel stockpot. Dan handed her the file using the forceps. Mary nodded and enunciated, “This should do the trick.” She shook the file in the air to help cool it. After five minutes of judicious filing, more probing, a second look at the sutured artery, some irrigation with saline solution, and some swabbing, Mary was almost done.
Meanwhile, Lisa finished taking the second unit of blood from Kevin, and capped his catheter, taping it securely in place.
Seeing this, Mary half-shouted, “Both T.K. and Dan should go lie down and start drinking fluids, pronto. I think that there are still a few bottles of Gatorade in the pantry. Let’s leave them prepped, in case they have to donate again. If absolutely necessary, they could each probably give another half unit tomorrow, if they take it easy. Let’s pray that Rose doesn’t start bleeding again.”
Next, Mary opened a bottle of saline and soaked several small rolls of gauze.
She looked up at Lisa, who was standing by her side, and declared, “I’m going to leave this wound open for the next few days. I’ll just pack it with this damp gauze. It would be a mistake to stitch her up prematurely. At this point drainage is much more important. We’ll watch her wound closely the next few days. I expect in a few days we’ll close the entrance side and a day later, the exit side, but even then I’ll probably want to leave a drainage tube in. Final closure won’t be done for about a week.”
Only when Mary glanced up at the clock did she realize that nearly three hours had gone by since she had started scrubbing up. After checking Rose’s vital signs once again, she said resolutely, “Well, that’s all I can do. She should make it though. The damage wasn’t too great, and I didn’t have to try anything fancy. Thank God for Colonel Fackler.”
“Who is he?” asked Jeff.
“He’s the surgeon who wrote the chapter on gunshot wounds in the NATO Emergency War Surgery manual. I wouldn’t have had a clue how to perform that operation if it weren’t for him.” With that, Mary pulled off her gloves and went to take a nap. She was completely spent.
The first addition to the group after it was started by Todd and T.K. was Ken Layton, a lanky, red-haired man with an infectious smile. He was an acquaintance of Tom’s. T.K. first met Layton through a Catholic “young adults” group.
Ken was of interest because he was an automobile mechanic. Although he had the necessary acumen, Ken had shown no interest in pursuing college when he graduated from high school. Instead, he immediately started working full time as an automobile mechanic. Turning wrenches was Ken’s idea of fun, and he certainly was good at it. By the time he joined the group, Ken had changed jobs twice, and was making $58,000 a year. By 2009, Ken was earning $98,000 a year as the assistant manager of a shop specializing in off-road vehicle repairs and modifications.
The next recruits into the group were Mike Nelson, a botany major at the University of Chicago, and his girlfriend, Lisa. Mike had met Lisa by chance at the university’s Regenstein Library. As Mike was walking through the stacks, he noticed an attractive young woman who was sitting at a study carrel reading Musashi’s A Book of Five Rings. He soon struck up a conversation with her about martial arts. For Mike, it was love at first sight.
Lisa was a graphic design major with interests that ranged from backpacking to tae kwon do, to sport parachuting. Lisa was of average height, with dark brown hair and unusually heavy eyebrows. She joined the group a few months after she and Mike began dating. Lisa was a talented airbrush artist. Over several years, she painted camouflage patterns on most of the group members’ long guns, to match their camouflage uniforms. She put three coats of clear flat lacquer over the camouflage paint, to keep it from chipping or wearing off. Initially, Lisa approached the group as just another one of her many hobbies. Later, it became an all-consuming passion that overwhelmed most of her other interests.
Upon getting his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees, Mike Nelson was unsuccessful at finding any position relating to botany. The only positions that he found available were low-paying GS-5 pay grade jobs as forest survey assistants. Out of desperation, he ended up taking a job as a Chicago police officer. He graduated second in his class at the police academy. Curiously, Mike found that he genuinely enjoyed police work. Like most newly hired officers, Mike was assigned night patrol duty. However, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Mike enjoyed the assignment. He later volunteered to continue night shifts, and even asked for assignments in Chicago’s rougher neighborhoods.
Mike told the other group members that his attraction to police work was the adrenaline rush of stressful situations. He said that the “fun” part of his job was getting into “a worst case do-or-die survival situation every other night.”
Meanwhile, Lisa found a job as an artist with a large architectural design firm.
She mainly did renderings of what a completed building would look like, complete with parking areas and landscaping. Eventually, she got the chance to take on other projects such as design and layout of a promotional brochure for the company, as well as work with the firm’s computer system that generated blueprint designs. Although it was not exactly the type of job she would have chosen, she enjoyed most of the aspects of her work, and it paid very well.
Mike and Lisa dated for two years before getting married. Although their schedules were not entirely compatible, they had a happy relationship. They both enjoyed the same activities, and both had the survival bent long before they joined the Group. Mike’s grandparents had built a bomb shelter in the early 1960s, and both they and his parents had encouraged Mike to be independent and self-reliant. Above all, they had told him: “Be Prepared.” Lisa received similar nurturing. She grew up in a large Mormon family where food storage was a way of life. Her strenuous and often dangerous hobbies had also built confidence, self-reliance, and an abiding love for the outdoors.
When she was a freshman in college, a fellow dorm resident loaned Lisa a copy of How to Prosper During the Coming BadYears by Howard J. Ruff. Reading Ruff’s book had already adjusted her to a “survival mind-set” as it was termed by the Group. Mike first mentioned the existence of the group to Lisa soon after they first began casually dating, just to see if she would give a positive or negative reaction. When he mentioned the Group’s plans to “head for the hills if the world falls apart,” the first words out of her mouth were, “Will you take me with you?”As their relationship blossomed, Mike and Lisa began spending nearly every weekend together. Most of these weekends were devoted to hiking, rock climbing, hunting, or fishing—anything to get out of the city.
It was Mike who first told Todd and T.K. about northern Idaho. During his graduate study, Mike had spent nine months living in Moscow, Idaho. There, he had studied “microclimate growth patterns of the Ponderosa Pine in eastern Washington and northern Idaho.” His graduate adviser had loved his paper, but that didn’t help him get a job as a working botanist.
Mike spoke in glowing terms about northern Idaho. He reported, “Idaho is big-time survival country. Half the population is composed of survivalists that don’t even realize that they are survivalists. Self-sufficiency is just their native way of life up there. They definitely have the survival mind-set. Almost everybody hunts. A lot of people use woodstoves and they cut their own wood.