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The Stripper Clip Club
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Its sad that you have to know this!
I was working nights in the ER at the Level 1 trauma center in Jackson, Mississippi. For a time Jackson, Mississippi, was, per capita, the most violent city in America. Places like Chicago and Detroit had larger body counts, to be sure. However, if shredded meat per unit population is your metric, Jackson eclipsed them all.
I never did a full shift in the ER without at least one gunshot wound. My personal record was seven. Once you got the holes plugged these unfortunate folks were surprisingly pleasant company, often even polite. The shooters weren’t typically psychopaths, not by a long shot. To an individual, they all just had poor impulse control.
The capacity to control one’s emotions is arguably the single greatest predictor of success in life. It isn’t money or race or social status. Most everybody I encountered shot up in the ER angered easily. Prisons are replete with such people.
Our hero was maybe eighteen or nineteen. For reasons that should soon become obvious, documenting his birthday was not our top priority. Our first inkling something was amiss was a frantic radio call from the ambulance. This young man had run afoul of some unlicensed pharmacist over turf, the exorbitant price of illicit pharmaceuticals, or the conflicted affections of some young lady. Eventually somebody slapped leather. He had been shot about fifteen minutes before reaching the ER.
It took five of us to hold him down. This guy was thoroughly jacked—think an anorexic Arnold Schwarzenegger circa 1984. He was also liberally festooned with gang tats. As they rolled him off the truck he was fighting like a Norse berserker—screaming, shouting, and cursing at all of us. All he wanted to do was to go home. He told us as much with great verve. How much of that was exogenous drugs, an innately fulminant personality, the intensity of the moment, or some toxic combination I shall leave to the philosophers.
We finally got him strapped to the bed and went to work. Once he realized he was not going anyplace he calmed down enough to speak. More to serve as a distraction than anything else, I innocently inquired who had done this to him. It didn’t matter at all. The perp was the cops’ problem, not ours. However, anyone in extremis benefits from a little redirection. They all wanted to share their stories. If I could get him focused on ratting out the guy who shot him he might not fight us so fiercely if we needed to start a central line. Panting from the exertion, he gasped sincerely, “It was Some Dude.”
The entire room erupted in marginally-restrained laughter. We weren’t trying to be cruel or make light of this poor guy’s sordid state. It was simply that his answer was so monotonously predictable. They all claimed some variation on this theme—“There I was, sitting on the front porch drinking iced tea and reading the Bible to my blind grandmother, when Some Dude jumped out from behind the bushes and busted a cap in my ass. It was dark and he was wearing a hoodie, so I couldn’t tell who it was, but he was packing a Glock nine…”
They all said that. If the local constabulary could just lock up Some Dude then Jackson would be instantly transformed into Mayberry. Mr. Dude was a bloodthirsty brigand indeed.
We got his clothes cut off easily enough. This guy was well and truly ripped. He had clearly logged some serious time with free weights. The external stigmata of his injury were deceptively benign.
There was a single black hole in his anterior chest roughly equidistant between the sternum and the right nipple. There was surprisingly little blood. There was also no corresponding exit wound.
Bullet holes are a special kind of black. They’re a bit like that inky dark spot between the stars on some warm spring evening bereft of overcast. Bullet holes seem to suck in both light and hope. This one was also sucking in a little air.
In my experience, thugs use whatever assortment of ammo they’re able to steal—sometimes it’s high-end, sometimes it’s crap. Cop bullets would reliably shred dudes. Thug rounds most typically just punched tidy little holes. However, just like real estate, the name of the game was location, location, location. This location was bad.
I’m expanding the timeline a bit. What happened here happened quickly. We were all working frenetically to keep this kid from dying. However, we were soon to be overcome by events.
I knew this guy for maybe ten minutes total. During that brief time he underwent the most remarkable transformation. When he rolled into the ER he was profane and venomous. He snarled at us, cursing and thrashing. He told us in no uncertain terms what he was going to do to us if we didn’t cut him loose and just let him go home. And then something creepy happened.
Gradually his demeanor thawed. He began begging us. He offered us money or drugs, anything we wanted, if only we would not let him die. This went on in the background for a few minutes, and then he ignored us altogether. That’s when he began to pray.
Maybe the guy grew up in church. Perhaps he had a Godly grandmother. At this point, our hero started praying like a nun at a Black Sabbath concert.
“Please, God, don’t let me die! Lord God Jesus, please don’t let me die! Oh, Jesus God, please don’t let me die!”
His voice got higher, and he struggled against his restraints. Then he arched his back and blew great gouts of blood out of his mouth and nose. It went all over the place. And then he died.
We worked on him for a while after that, but there was no fixing that much broken. We postulated that the round had likely perforated his pulmonary vasculature. These large-caliber vessels carry vast quantities of blood, particularly when you are properly tooled up. Most of your chest is empty space. Every second after he had been shot, he had been bleeding into his lungs.
A typical adult human carries around five liters of blood—two and one-half two-liter Coke bottles. Lose a liter of that in twenty minutes, and normal people are flirting with unconsciousness. Make that two liters, and it becomes life-threatening. There is surprisingly a lot of space in your lungs to park blood.
The support staff in such a world—the nurses, respiratory techs, and the like—are all of them maniacs. That’s the only reason anyone might voluntarily work in a place like that. They goaded the surgical residents for not cracking the guy’s chest right there in Trauma 1. However, the surgeons had all done this before. That’s not something sensible folk aspire to do.
I washed up and took a minute, actually about five. While we were dealing with our condemned thug, life went on in the ER. That meant sewing up lacerations, stabilizing broken bones, and valiantly battling the scourge of venereal disease one shameless John at a time. However, my heart wasn’t really in it. The rest of the night was a bit of a blur.
I had a half-hour drive to get home. I didn’t want my family to live in the kind of place where I worked. The parts of Jackson I traversed going home looked like Mogadishu. Some of the street walkers and drug dealers I saw in the ER likely plied their trades around my daily commute. By the time I got home the sun had come up. I pulled into my garage utterly spent.
My first stop was the laundry room. There I found Samantha, our golden retriever rescue. She was a simply magnificent dog—affectionate, loyal, and without a mean bone in her body. The fact that she was in the laundry room meant that she had been a distraction. My wife homeschooled our three kids. Whenever Samantha’s presence began adversely affecting the kids’ school work, she got banished. The same thing happened to me from time to time.
This time I needed her. I rubbed her ears and accepted her unqualified affection with gratitude. That’s the great thing about dogs. They love you when you’re tired, grouchy, and smell bad. Unlike humans, canine love does not come with preconditions. In this case, Samantha was showing an unnatural interest in my shoes. That’s when I realized it.
My sneakers were liberally doused in human blood. The vile stuff had also gotten into my socks. We typically gird up with goofy little booties and such, but this evening there had been no time. I shed all of it, scrubbed everything down in the sink, and put my shoes out in the garage to free Samantha from temptation. Now finally barefoot and suitable to reenter the land of the living, I stood beside the closed door and just listened.
On the other side of the door there was laughter and happiness not befouled by the world I had just abandoned. The kids didn’t always like school, and my wife was a serious teacher. However, there was so much love there. I felt vaguely like a man crossing a great desert who finally had water within his grasp. With that I pushed into the house.
The kids jumped up and ran over to grab my legs. My wife tolerated the interruption. I hugged each of them in series and then my bride. That was when she innocently queried, “How was your night?”
How do you answer that? I had just put my sneakers in the garage so the dog wouldn’t be drawn to the human blood that defiled them. My family did not need to be befouled by such as that. My wife never signed up for it. I just smiled and said fine. When you live long enough in an asylum, eventually it starts to feel like home.
NY Post – DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro notched a significant legal victory Monday after retired four-star Navy Adm. Robert Burke was found guilty of bribery charges related to a scheme to steer government contracts to his future employer.
Burke, who served as the vice chief of naval operations during part of President Trump’s first term, was convicted of conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery, performing acts affecting a personal financial interest and concealing material facts from the US after a five-day trial. Formerly the Navy’s second-highest-ranking officer, Burke is now the most senior member of the US military to ever be convicted of a federal crime.
“When you abuse your position and betray the public trust to line your own pockets, it undermines the confidence in the government you represent,” Pirro said in a statement after the verdict. “Our office, with our law enforcement partners, will root out corruption — be it bribes or illegal contracts — and hold accountable the perpetrators, no matter what title or rank they hold.” 
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WEST TEXAS RED By Jimmy Ewing
We landed in El Paso in plenty of time to make it to the ranch by 4 p.m. The trip down was uneventful and we hooked up with our hunting guide, somehow a native Botswanan going by “O’Shaughnessey,”—the name completing the incongruity—and we turned off the paved road onto a dirt track that took us deep into the wilds of West Texas cattle country.
A full half-hour of driving led us to the “lodge” which turned out to be an early 1900s train station building moved and repurposed as a hunting cabin, with naked lightbulbs strung from high ceilings and run by solar, with long pull cords fed through tiny pulleys along the wall terminating in retired and de-hooked crankbaits for pull knobs, no heating or air, and stumps for camp chairs.
The “chef” proved to be an unflappably cheerful pipeline inspector named Greg. Four rail-thin mattresses with poked-through springs and a small gas-powered stove, eight bird dogs, a refrigerator, a smoker, two rocking chairs and a covey of blue quail under the porch completed the ensemble.
David looked at me from under his ballcap and said, “Well, here we are.” Tone and context sometimes passes more along than the actual words, I find.
Fire, three cocktails and the usual pleasantries due among four type-A strangers all sharing close accommodation and proximity to uncased firearms complete, we each found our best body contour to wrap between un-sprung mattress springs and settled in for the night.
A scaled, or blue, quail is an interesting critter; something of a bastard cousin to the bobwhite, I don’t feel they get the interest or respect they deserve. Hell, any ground nesting prey animal set to make a living in that inhospitable land of creosote and dust has my appreciation, if not downright admiration, but their gentlemanly southern relative and the gaudy Chinese import cousin to the north both seem to garner more praise and esteem. I can see no real reason for this other than, perhaps, the inhospitable terrain ole’ blue calls home.
We pulled out in the morning shortly after daylight seated high atop a customized ‘90s Jeep Wrangler with our Botswanan of Irish descent, Ryan O’Shaughnessey, PhD (we come to find out), at the helm and spent the next two days pushing bore holes on 88,000 acres for scaled quail, finding about one decent covey per stop and, in general, covering ourselves in glory. The scaled quail, it turns out, is right primed to run, turning nearly any point into a quarter-mile-long affair full of strategy, pageantry and often, defeat.
My partner on this adventure was a man of unusual talent with a scattergun, leading us to a very respectable daily bag and an overall successful trip, making friends in Ryan and Greg, and developing a new appreciation for West Texas’ inhospitable terrain. But just after the last coveyrise of our second day, we picked up the birds that had fallen to our initial volley, then made a quick turn back toward the Jeep and a convenient access point in the fence line.
As I leaned across the gate to decipher yet another classic West Texas improvised gate locking mechanism, the lead dog, a big bull-headed pointer named Red, burst through the dense broom grass and mesquite ahead of me and cut across the trail, head high and wind in his nose. His path took him square across the back of a 5½ foot-long western diamondback sunning in the path. The big snake coiled and struck in the blink of an eye, hitting Red center mass with a hollow, crushing thud like a bare fist to the chest.
The dog and snake tangled, cartwheeled, then came apart, Red returning to his master, stricken, as the snake began his hollow, rattling, death cry. I settled up with the snake, then turned to the Jeep to make what we could of the situation, not hoping for much, the dog in Ryan’s arms already beginning to swell and to shake.
The trip back to the ranch was an eternity, the handoff quick, and Ryan set off for town and the vet—making time as best he could. A full 45-minutes from a paved road and another hour from proper civilization, I doubt I would have made it if it had been me—and, unfortunately, Red didn’t. That dog gave his life and left me with mine, taking a lethal dose of venom meant for me from a snake as big around as my bicep with a wicked set of inch-long fangs.
The natural world is unforgiving. Modern man lives more or less alongside it; entering it only when we choose, taking our place in the food chain but briefly, before retreating to the comfort and convenience of air conditioning and food on speed-dial. But not that big diamondback, and not a bull-headed bird dog named Red.
RIP West Texas Red. 
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