Floating Home to Jesus -March, 2003 Here's the thing with those masks, army gas masks, wide silver-eyed predatory bug gear. They're scary to see. Horrifying. Conjuring circles of hell and faceless beasts who cannot be negotiated with, carrying sudden, stiff death in their wake. They're even scarier to be in, those masks. Here's two initialisms you need to know to follow the play-by-play on CNN: NBC is not a broadcast network, it means Nuclear, Biological, Chemical (or NoBody Cares, depending on your length of time in the foxhole); and MOPP is not a Swiffer, it's Mission Oriented Protective Posture, and is the suit you wear along with the mask when a baddy (or, perhaps, your own army, oops) drops some NBC on your head. I know -- I know -- I speak for all soldiers and Marines when I say how NBC and MOPP stuff is the suckiest of all things that suck about being a grunt. There is not one thing that sucks harder. You have nine seconds to get the mask on. It's a process of getting it out of the case, over your head, securing flaps and strings, then clearing the mask of the air you brought in with you. Nine seconds to do this. It's dark in there. And quiet. As if when you clear the outside air you clear the whole world. Sounds are muffled. Even rifle shots from your own M16 take on a different tone. You have no idea what that idiot private next to you is jabbering on and on about, flailing his arms. Hopefully it's not important. Some of the masks don't work (all army equipment is made by the lowest bidder) or maybe you might not get it on in time, so they give you an autoinjector of atropine. If you eat gas and quickly find yourself either acting very weird or in excrutiating pain or both, grab the injector and jab the needle into your ass (it's fleshy there). The old sergeant medic at Fort Knox who taught us how to use this stuff chuckled over the autoinjector, and tapped it on the podium. "I look at it this way," he said. "Mustard gas is gonna hurt like hell as it's killing me. The atropine will just take the waiting out of the equation. Me, I'm gonna jab three or four of these puppies in and float on home to Jesus."