Mountain School
The essay Mountain School, about my experiences as the medical support for the Vermont Army National Guard’s Mountain School, including a memorable bit about a sergeant and his goose, appeared in Military Experience and the Arts in 2023. Here is the opening paragraph and the link is provided below.
As the airliner closed in on Montpelier, a snowy landscape stretched toward the hulking silhouette of the Green Mountains in the distance, a vista radically different from the flat piney woods and marshlands of my native south Georgia. My destination lay nestled somewhere in those mountains—Camp Ethan Allen, home of the Vermont Army National Guard’s mountain warfare school, just outside the small town of Jericho. As someone who spent his youth on water skis and never put on snow skis until age thirty, I felt apprehensive about this assignment I had volunteered for. Second guessing myself. What did I know about mountains?
