dragonlady7

I wrote this down in Pennsylvania and had forgotten about it until I was closing open documents in my TextWrangler program. So here's a story from my road trip with my sister. The lead-up's long but I think I was trying to establish a mood/backdrop, so I guess I'll leave it.

It was a long ride, but not as mind-shattering as we'd all expected. The dogs settled in, anxious and unhappy but quiet and relatively sedentary. It was easiest if I drove, most of the time; we could not remove the baby from his car seat so he could not breastfeed while we were in motion, but his mother could pump while he slept and then give him a bottle of breast milk when he woke without us needing to stop the car.
It was very complicated for us to stop, as the dogs' good natured resignation vanished when the vehicle halted, and they would become agitated, loud, and not careful where they put their feet. So we never stopped more often than two hours; only occasionally could we continue for more than two hours at a stretch.
Our roles solidified: Baby in his car seat behind the passenger's seat, because his mother thought that would be the least likely place to be damaged in a car accident. (We never really verified whether this was the case.) Next to him sat his mother, and next to her sat Lizzie, the larger dog, with a cooler full of ice (and juice and baby food and beverages) in the foot space with a dog bed covering it and the seat so there was properly room for a dog to rest. It was a tight squeeze. Then in the front passenger's seat sat Scout, the smaller of the two dogs. Until she became agitated and needed her mama, when we switched her with Lizzie, who loomed worriedly over me as I drove.
I drove all but two or three hours of the two-day trip.

Mostly the baby slept. He would sleep after he was fed, and to his mother's surprise he took several two-hour naps. David is generally a one nap a day type of baby, but travel seemed to tire him enough that we had little problem with him being alert and unhappy. He needed constant entertainment when awake, and if he awoke with no attendant nearby to comfort him, he would become upset.

The car seat was a new one, and Katy decided she didn't like it much. It had an elaborate cushioned headrest, the effect of which was to push the child's head forward so that when he slept, it would loll onto his chest or shoulders. So she spent quite a few hours sitting patiently beside him with one hand on his forehead. Sometimes the dog beside her would begin to whine or demand attention, so Katy would pet her with her other hand; I would look back and she would be carefully balancing her attention between infant and springer spaniel.

The second day as we sat in this configuration, Katy with one hand holding David's head still and the other consoling poor anxious Lizzie, we encountered some traffic. I mentioned a traffic jam I'd been in, much worse than this one-- this one was tiny and caused by construction, but the other one had been in Canada with a four-lane highway closed down for what proved to be a fatal accident. As we'd finally rolled past there had been a figure covered in a white sheet beside the wreckage, still there after the ambulance had already departed with the injured.
"I decided then that I'd really rather not have known why we sat there for an hour," I concluded.
She made a noise of agreement, then said reflectively, "That was the worst duty in Iraq."
"What was?" I asked rashly, not understanding that she wasn't changing the subject.
"IED cleanup," she said. Improvised Explosive Devices were her area's worst threat; concealed explosives under roads, mostly, they largely caused fatalities when vehicles drove over them. "The vehicles," she clarified. "The units had to clean up the trucks after the remains had been removed. But the thing is, of course, well... When you get blown up, you get... blown up. So they can't... there were mortuary specialists, of course, and it was their job to take care of the remains, but they couldn't... get... well, everything. And there were only two of them. So we all took turns on that duty." She paused, making sure her son's head was in the right position.
"We had a couple of battalions," she went on. "So we traded. When the Cav battalion had an IED fatality, we'd clean their truck for them, and they'd do ours. So, at the very least, it was never anybody you knew. ... So, you'd have to clean thoroughly, and... anything you found that was.... remains, you'd turn over to the mortuary people and they'd... put them, kind of... with the rest, to send home." She paused for another moment, reassuring the anxious dog as we went over a bump, and readjusting the infant's head.
"We had only two fatalities in our unit," she said. "That I knew. And that was... going to see them... a mess. The one guy lost both legs. They put... you know... back together... Well," she concluded, "It was a mess."

I had never really thought about who had to take care of that. And I think of myself as the kind of person who thinks of things like that.