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Did you ever think that maybe there's a reason behind that? Look up unit cohesion. I'm sorry, but I've tried pretty hard here to be patient, consider your age and experience, support you, give you some slack and maybe explain to others where you might be coming from. But this crap just sounds whiney and immature. You do realize that you joined the ARMY, right? Not a fraternity or the golf team. So you had a bay for AIT, big deal! My entire enlistment, that bay at Ft Sam was the nicest quarters I had! Otherwise, I split time between a semi-insulated, unheated, open-rafter barracks built at the start of the Korean war and a cot in the corner of a chopper hanger. Then while deployed in the early days of FOBs, I saw a cot and tent a total of 14 times in 12 months, sleeping in abandoned buildings and in or under my truck. So excuse me if I don't sympathize with your irritation over living in a bay for 18 weeks. And passes? Yeah, those aren't a right, they are earned. And with the sorry excuse for discipline I see in the majority of new recruits... Too many females got raped? I'd say that's a major issue and damn good reason to clamp down on free time! Damn, you used to get passes pulled for not having your boots shined enough or because the DS decided the bay floor needed to be buffed. You don't like mass punishment. Do you understand the reason behind it? It's to get you into the mindset that you are a team - you live, work, and function as a unit. Particularly as a medic or infantry grunt, if you can't grasp that mindset, that concept of unit cohesion, you will fail. You or someone else will die. You might prefer an individual slap on the hand, but it's not preschool, it's the ARMY, and the Army is in the business of WAR, where slaps on the hand and individuals don't mean a damn thing. They are trying to prepare you for the reality of that. Instead of whining about it, maybe you should find the reasons behind it. Someone as "HOOAH" as you seem to be, proud of your uniform and preparing for a first deployment, you should be taking every opportunity to learn from people with experience, from your instructors, what it really takes to be a good soldier and a good medic. Everybody comes out of AIT feeling like they've conquered the world and are now johnny badass - you haven't and you're not. You should feel good, confident in what you have accomplished, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The reality is that your education starts when you walk into your first unit. God Bless the "new Army." -SGT Boyce edited for formatting

First some backround: I have recently started a new job, about a month ago. I will be working with the critical care transport team out of the local children's hospital. But since I haven't driven before, and I will be required to drive halfway, I am down at the company's corporate office getting some driving practice. Right now I am doing mostly interfacility transports, which I have not done before. I do have some 911 experience. Now here is my problem: I have worked with this same partner for 4 shifts now. After we load the patient, I usually shut the doors, he gets in, I get up front and start the truck. Put on my seat belt, and ask him if he is ready to go. I do this because I know some people prefer to get some of the paperwork and vitals out of the way before getting underway. From the beginning, he told me that I do not need to wait, that he is fine to do it while I am driving. Yesterday, After an extremely busy day of 7 back to back calls, we got a call to the NH that we were just leaving, to take a pt to the ER, emergency, no L&S, for hypotension. Upon arrival, the nurse stated that the patient had been having hypotension for about an hour, first BP being 90/50. Thirty Minutes later, it was 85/50. The patient stated she had been nauseas earlier in the day, and was feeling flushed now. When we arrived at the hospital, The charge nurse asked what her BP was on the way. My partner stated it was 100/50. The nurse said, oh good it came up, and walked away. My partner asked for her signature, gave her the paperwork, and she walked away. After the call, as we were making up the stretcher, he made a comment about the call being BS anyway, and it began a conversation that really disgusted me. He hadn't taken the patient's BP, or any vitals, nor does he ever take any vitals. He makes them up on the state forms, and he had lied to the nurse about the pt's bp. I was really upset. I asked him to explain himself, and he said its just a transport its not really important to take vitals, and he can't hear with all the noise. When I pointed out that i always give him the opportunity to do them before taking off, he just shrugged his shoulders and walked away. I feel that what he is doing is wrong. I am just not sure what to do. Do i report this to a supervisor? I am afraid to make a big stink of this, as I don't want to be seen as the new girl that comes in and causes a ruckus. But I also want to make sure that my partner isn't compromising patient care! Some advice please!

The other month I was heading north on I93 heading back to NH from RI, its a route I always take and I know it very well. It was about midnight and I saw a car with MA plates cut across three lanes of empty highway and cut off the only other car infront of me sending it into median guard rail. I saw the whole thing happen from about 100 feet back in the left lane. So I cut across and stoped about 100 feet ahead of the wreck. I get out of my car and check out the werck and well no suprise the smell of cheep beer is everywhere. The guy seems to be fine with the exception of a large cut on his head. I call it into 911 just to get cut off by the 911 dispatcher as soon as I give her the mile marker, location and what happend. So after about 10 mins the state police showed up and arrested the guy and waited for EMS. It just suprises me that not a soul from the many passing cars cared to stop or even slow down to look at the wreck. That just pisses me off in my opinion to high heck. I belive the best thing in life you can do is to help someone. Yet not a single soul cared to stop or even slow down to see if this guy was all right besides me. I keep alot of emergency stuff in my car just in case I come across a emergency and I know all of it will come in handy someday and just maybe help someone in need. I dont know if just Massachusetts or bad luck I just hope I dont crash my car there. The question I ask all you fine folks is if you saw the same thing and no one was on the scene would you stop to help till the Emergency serivces got there?

The references to Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh are not only irrelevant, but only serve to inflame the emotions of those involved in this discussion. The actions of Kaczynski were ideological, not religiously motivated. He was protesting technology and development. The actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were not religiously motivated either. They blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in a plitical protest of the government's handling of the incidents at Ruby Ridge, ID; and the standoff in Waco, TX. We haven't heard of any other places of worship being built in the vicinity of Ground Zero, and to be completly honest; the building of an Islamic mosque so close to that area only serves to inflame the passions of all Americans. While not all Muslims are guilty of the atrocities that occurred on 9/11, it IS however the actions of a few radical Muslims that killed so many innocent people for nothing more than trying to cripple the greatest country in the world. To allow the construction of this mosque appears to be nothing more than rubbing salt in a wound that I doubt will ever fully heal. It's almost as if the Islamic religion is intentionally antagonizing American citizens. I don't think that anyone that's taken part in this discussion has implied, said or even hinted that those victims that were non-Christian are any less relevant than those Christians that were killed. I personally don't care if you choose to believe in God, Yaweh, Buddha, Allah or any other 'supreme deity', or whether you choose not to acknowledge a 'supreme entity' at all. If your belief system brings you happiness, then more power to you! Tolerance is mutual. By the actions of some of the Islamic nation, they have proven that tolerance is not something they are willing to give. As I've stated before, due to the actions of some religious zealots, Ground Zero has become a sort of 'holy ground'. To build a mosque near by is to thumb your nose at the victims and families that lost friends and relatives in that tragedy. It's in poor form, and then to DEMAND tolerance is just adding insult to injury.

I've been sitting on my hands, trying to decide if I really want to get into this one. So far, I've stayed away from politics and such on this site, but I've been talking this particular topic elsewhere so, here goes... Somewhere along the way, people in this country got the definition of tolerance confused with the definitions of acceptance and agreement. Being upset over this brazen act of disrespect (yes, that's what it is) has nothing to do with being intolerant of Muslims or their beliefs. Webster's, Tolerate: "to recognize and respect [other's belief's, practices, opinions, etc] without sharing them" and "to bear or put up with [someone or something not liked]" If anything, the insistence of placing a Muslim development (it's much more than just a mosque) at Ground Zero is "intolerant" (in the PC definition of the word), insensitive and grossly disrespectful to the feelings and beliefs the people of New York and this nation. It's a blatant act of arrogance and contempt, taking pleasure in rubbing salt in an old wound. How do we think it will be seen by the Islamic world? The placement of mosques throughout Islamic history has been an expression of conquest and superiority over non-Muslims. Muslims built the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in order to proclaim Islam’s superiority to Judaism. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus was built over the Church of St. John the Baptist, and the Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople was converted into a mosque, to express the superiority of Islam over Christianity. Historians have estimated that over 2,000 mosques in India were built on the sites of Hindu temples for the same reason. But the Ground Zero mosque, or mosques, won’t be another example of that Islamic supremacism, will they? After all, the mosque initiative’s organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, has said that the building of the mosque by the World Trade Center site was intended to make “the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.” The group behind the 15 story Islamic Center sent a statement to Mike Huckabee’s show on Fox News, claiming that the planned mosque was “a project to honor those who were harmed on September 11. It is a project to proclaim our patriotism to this country and to stand side-by-side all men and women of peace.” And Ground Zero is not a holy site, so the symbolism of Islam conquering and replacing other religions isn’t there—or is it? The Twin Towers, after all, were the symbol of America’s economic power. Placing a mosque by the site of their destruction (at the hands of Islamic jihadists) symbolizes the taming of that power. Abdul Rauf has placed the blame for 9/11 not on jihadists at all, but on the U.S. and the West, saying that they “must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end.” Statements like that call into question just who the mosque organizers have in mind when they say the mosque is intended to honor “those who were harmed on September 11.” The possibility of deception cannot here be ruled out, given that Abdul Rauf has a history of making smooth statements that appear to endorse American principles and values, when on closer examination he is upholding Sharia law, denigrating freedom of speech, and advocating against anti-terror measures. You all are sitting here arguing religion and missing the point completely. Islam and it's purposeful spread isn't about religion - it's about ideology. And it's an ideology that directly clashes with everything our nation stands for.

Here here! See, most, including I, value tolerance. As Sam Harris would say, the only way that we are going to be able to move forward in the world today in the face of multiple separate groups of people with irreconcilable, incompatible views on what happens after we die and what our creator demands of us before then, is to value open honest conversation. It is merely an obsession with being "politically correct" that demands that we here in America subscribe to the idea that we must be tolerant of intolerance. The creators of southpark were threatened with murder for depicting the prophet Muhammad in a bear costume in a cartoon, and the liberal ideologues have the nerve to tell southpark to be more sensitive to others and that their cartoons are inciting intolerance. American liberals tell us that it is ok for extremists to threaten murder for such things, because it is the religious laws in their land and who are we to tell them they are wrong. Yet, it is a seemingly one way street and as Americans we must bend to the will of everyone else and do not have the right to be angry over an islamic church being built were our way of life and citizens were attacked, lest we be viewed as intolerant and bigoted to suggest that we do not wish such things built near ground zero. Keep in mind, I am a very politically liberal. I envision an open society where everyone is free to believe what they wish, I just find it infuriating that we are required to tolerate intolerance for fear of being labeled as unaccepting of other cultures if we do not. And this is not a Christian perspective because we are not a Christian nation, but a secular one.

Let's be honest here... Building a mosque at Ground Zero is a brutal slap in the face. It sends a message (whether intended or not): "We knocked down the World Trade Center and killed THOUSANDS of your infidel citzens in the name of Allah, now we will build a shrine to him on the very ground that we spilled so much of your blood on!" Be 'tolerant'? I think not! It would be no different than going into Iraq, blowing up the center of their economy, government, militia and killing thousands of innocent civilians and building a Christian church on the site. Ground Zero has become 'holy ground'for this country. To allow a shrine to the very god they were serving to level the buildings that stood there is beyond 'poor taste/poor form'. If we must be 'tolerant' of the muslims, then we should expect some 'tolerance' in return. Tolerance is a two way street; you not only get it, you have to give it.

Ummm... turnip prefaced his post with "To play the devils advocate and not politically correct." He was disagreeing, not to run you down, but to generate discussion... which is why he started his post with that comment. I agree - Old Testament is filled with extreme characters; however, New Testament writings are focused more on grace, strength, love, and forgiveness, based on the life and teachings of Jesus, as written by his disciples. Like any religious beliefs, there are extremists within Christianity as well.

While I agree that as a whole, the Islamic religion does not represent the views of extremists, it irks me that a mosque (a representation of Islam) is being built at the foot of two amazing structures destroyed by muslim extremism. Some of you here might argue that it was actually socioeconomic and political factors that gave rise to Muslim extremism that took countless lives on 9/11, but you would be wrong. Most of the conspirators including the pilots in the 9/11 plot had PhDs, and were from wealthy backgrounds. Recent psychological research into religious extremism finds that even after you correct for poverty, lack of economic opportunity, etc, extremist views in the middle east actually increase. "Go forth in Jihad... [9.39] If you do not go forth in Jihad, He will chastise you with a painful chastisement and bring in your place a people other than you [to go on Jihad]"... Um, have you read the Old Testament? Yahweh of the old testament is perhaps one of the most unpleasant, cruel, jealous characters ever to be written about in any book.

Er. I think there's a bit of a difference between a mosque and a burning cross. A better analogy would be no white owned churches in black neighborhoods. Ted Kacynski, Tim McVeigh, and the abortion clinic bombers all send their regards. Also, there was a pretty lengthy period when the Christians were the world's terrorists. It doesn't make terrorism right, but neither does claiming that any one religion is someone the religion of terror. Well, gee, we weren't expecting a Spanish Inquisition or anything. Also, what about the numerous Muslims who who weren't terrorists that died on 9/11? Oh, wait, their death means less than those real, red blooded Christian Americans who died, right? Also, how far away is "appropriate." Should any mosques currently in that radius be torn down? Should churches be torn down near abortion clinics because radical Christians bombed abortion clinics? I'm sorry... you lost me here. Are you saying that Christian religions aren't homophobic or contain scriptures that consider any non-Christian religion as being sinful? Also, there's a very large difference between not ignoring a child who hits other people and blaming an entire religion for the acts of a few, regardless of what that few claim that their actions are for. Any response to this conversation being turned around? ..and, for the record, child molestation is not an issue unique to the Catholic Church. Example, those crazy Baptists who blamed a girl for getting pregnant after being raped. No more Baptist churches with in 1000 feet of a playground or school? http://www.concordmonitor.com/article/police-girl-raped-then-relocated

Herbie, that is an excellent analogy! I do think that there are times when political correctness goes too far, and the wishes of a few outweigh the wishes of the many. This mosque is going to be offensive to many who travel to Ground Zero. Although Christianity has its bizarre splinter groups, overall, Christianity focuses on leading a life free of sin, including avoiding sinning against others. Leading a sin free life includes treating others well, and forgiving those who do ill to you, and loving all people. Forgiving sins is not the same as ignoring sins. Christianity does not tell people to ignore the sins of others. The Bible says to “turn the other cheek” but it does not tell its followers to ignore abuse. We do not ignore a child who continually hits others. We do not ignore a person who abuses others. We do not say “oh, it is their belief and so we must tolerate their behaviors.” Some religions teach their followers to actively discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, or nationality. So why then, do we ignore the beliefs of certain religious groups, who teach racism, sexism, homophobia, hatred of other religions, etc., in the name of tolerance? Yes, there are members of the Muslim community who are not terrorists, and are kind, compassionate members of society. Perhaps we should expect them to control their own members, much as we expect a parent to control their screaming child. By not allowing this mosque to be built, we are sending the message “we will not accept your religion in this area, due to the damage, pain and suffering some members of your religion have caused to those in this area.” Why is that a bad thing? By showing members of the Muslim community that they have to control their own members in order to be welcome in America, we are not being intolerant – we are protecting our own innocent members of our society.

Ya... even the Mac n Cheese color nobody could ever find a use for... still has the Crayola wrapper on it. OK, I understand that you're in the 101st Airborne. Congrats, you got an assignment with hype attached to it. Forgive me if I don't treat you as a superior officer, as my SO is currently deployed in Iraq on his 3rd tour, but doesn't have near the same ignorant, sexist, testosterone-fueled attitude you seem to have. Yes, in the 101st Airborne you won't treat a female soldier because there aren't any in the line you work directly with. But, in the above statement, you referred to "combat medics" so just because you are with a group of all men, doesn't mean you represent the majority of combat medics, who most likely do work with -- and treat -- female soldiers at some point in time or another. As far as being called an 'EMT', it's not meant as an insult here. But, "Combat Medic" is your military title. You are nowhere near trained enough to be considered a civvy Medic. And some of your previous posts make me wonder if you even deserve the civvy EMT title. We understand that being called a Medic is respected, but here you don't have enough training or intelligence to be pulled into that group. It's not that we're not understanding you, it's that we want you to know we disagree with your opinion and think your way of thinking is wrong. BSI needs to come first, regardless of the situation. Knowing you don't take the few seconds it requires to don a pair of gloves before administering what will most likely be life-saving treatment makes me nervous for you and for the people you treat. You say you can't wear gloves because the enemy will know you're a medic and will target your first, which is probably true, but what do you think they will think you are when they see you saving a soldier's life? And if they happen to put it together and realize you are not protecting yourself or the people you treat, do you realize how easy it would be for them to screw up the rest of your life? Bullets are easily contaminated. I mean no disrespect in what I've said here. I respect you immensely for being an American Soldier and for fighting for my rights to even say these things. But, just because I respect what you as a soldier represent, doesn't mean I respect or remotely agree with your opinion. Be safe. And please also consider the safety and health of the other soldiers you treat. Protect them as much as you respect them.

I have stopped and helped people from accidents all over this great country so yes i would have stopped and helped. If I get hurt helping than thats what my health insurance is for but at least i will have the satisfaction of helping.

That's a good idea. Bring it up and see what they say. Personally, I would say you absolutely need to report him for this. The PCRs become part of the medical record (here at least) and medical records are legal documents. Falsifying it can equal the same punishment, if not worse (plus lawsuit possibilities) as falsifying a police report or court document. And if you're 'allowing' it to happen, you could be held responsible for aiding him in writing false reports. Of course, that's worse-case scenario. Not trying to say you are doing anything wrong, but I just wouldn't want you to get in trouble for not standing up for yourself, because you're nervous about being the 'newbie pest'.

Again your not understanding me. I know females get into fire fights and whatnot, but i am assigned to an infantry platoon of all males. I go out with them. No females in the infantry. Im not saying females dont fight, but i dont treat females because of the type of unit i am in. I go one patrols and missions and whatnot with the infantry. I am a line medic. The females are in support battalions and HHC companies, which have their own medics. Im not saying i NEVER will treat a female, but i am in infantry. Support and HHC have their own missions and their own medics. I am an EMT-B i know BSI is before everything as an EMT, but as a combat medic in the US Army its not too big of a deal. I know it sounds terrible to you guys because its drilled into you as an EMT. Its really different here. I wear gloves in garrison, dont get me wrong. But down there, you dont always have the time todo so. BSI is always good, dont get me wrong. My life and welfare is precious to me, but as a combat medic BSI is preffered but its accepted you wont always have time to get it on. Even in my civilian clothes i always have a pair of gloves in my pocket...but its just different here in the Army. I know its tough and it sounds outrageos to you all i can tell...but its about another persons life, not mine. Someone mentioned just wearing gloves when going into combat........i cant do that. Gloves let the enemy know i am a medic and they will shoot at me first. There arent enough combat medics in the army. I appreciate what all of you guys do. I am a different kind of EMS

LOL i get -2 rep for talking about how the 232 medical battalion is, LOL. But yeah too many females got raped so they took our overnight passes and whatnot. Did you know 68w(medic) and 11B(Infantry) are the only people living in bays for AIT? Every other MOS gets 2 to 4 man rooms for AIT. Lol.