For Charles Drago

[Ed Jewett]

• Without having read every last word in this thread, or on this topic...
  
• without taking any sides for or against anyone, any hypothesis, or any scenario (now or in the future)...
  
• without (yes, it is true) offering up a hypothesis or scenario of my own beyond the following;
  
• I would like to make the following observations and comments:
  

#1) The state of the art in terms of street medicine for ambulance attendants in the Deep South in 1963 was next to nil. Absent. Non-existent. I can state that with great comfort and assurance since I was personally involved in the ambulance trade on both sides of the great divide (i.e., before and after change); indeed, I was part of the change. So any attempted insight into what the ambulance staff might or might not have done, or their understanding of the body bio-mechanics of that act, can only be based on an observer's sense based on education, training and public awareness that was built after the change. It's not the scientific biology of the human body that changed; it is the available-to-action understanding of that that was widely available in that society at that time.

I know this because I worked my way through college as an ambulance driver (1966-1975) and, in the great medical mecca of the world known locally as Massachusetts, the enabling legislation passed in 1973, the outgrowth of awareness of trauma surgeons seerving in field hospitals during Vietnam and codified by the AAOS curriculum; I was one of the very first people to take this 40-hour course. [Prior to that, training required a simple first aid course plus. As for CPR, it was essentially brand-new at that time [ http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/CPRAndECC/...ticle.jsp# ] and exists as a "standard of performance" that, even today, is widely debated. And certification even today [ http://www.jems.com/tags/massachusetts-c...on-scandal ] is subject to criminal, fraudulent and other influences. If "folks" can forge passports, how easy might it have been to put a non-standardized ambulance employee into the vehicle that transported LHO, or in the treatment facility? If there were forged SS credentials...

#2) The social standing and professionalism of the average ambulance attendant in the Deep South in 1963 was probably just above sanitation worker. In Massachusetts years later, most emergency ambulance service was a direct extension (sometimes using sub-contracting companies, like they do for towing vehicles) of the police department or, alternately, run by the local funeral service. [See above in re: medical state of the art.] As such, the field was wide open to the exertion of social, political, covert, intimidating pressure on someone in an ambulance as a staff at that time. The events of Dealey Plaza are littered with police "buddies", informants, and sub-tabular alignments and allegiances.

#3) Check with someone conversant with the ballistics of that time and era and weapon, but it is my understanding that a "blank" still files a projectile. That it is mostly a wad of paper and the residue of powder makes it seemingly benign; it can't be harmful as there was no bullet, capische? But at close range the sound of the discharge, the flash of the powder, and the impact of a wad is enough to generate an autonomic reaction of fear and pain that appears to be quite real despite the fact that there was no bullet. In other words, before LHO could bodily comprehend that there was no bullet (if there was none), he could well have had an "apparently nearly fatal" reaction to the wad.

"In other words, before we recognize the stick in our path as not being a snake, we have already jumped out of its way."

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How might the emerging understandings of how the human mind works in bio-neurological terms provide insights that will unlock deep political conundrums?.