YouSaid · the spoken record

Kelsi Sheren

lines on the record: 316
first: 2021-10-14
most recent: 2021-10-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so I reached out to actually a bunch of people even before I wrote the book, and I didn't get a lot of answers. Well, once I did Jocko, all the people have reached out to me and were like, hey, and I'm like, called you. So now I'm working. That's why I'm doing the rewrite is I'm working on making sure that things are exact. And so there was infantry units going in out of that fob. And it was a really tiny fob. It was run by the Americans, and then there was a tiny little corner that was the Canadian Artillery Unit. And the Americans, normally it's Americans shooting for Americans, Canadians shooting for Canadians. The rest of the regiment that deployed, so Bravo and Charlie, they were at Canadian fobs, Massamguard and another one. And these were huge fobs. Ours was this tiny like three kilometer around.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't call it an actual base. You sleep in tents and cots, and it is the walls are this mesh material that are filled with gravel. And that's the walls And then you have towers, you had five. I think we had five towers because the Americans ran four and we ran one. And so it was an American fob. It's called Fob Ramrod. And there was a, what are they Marines? No, I think they were the 101st. They were out of their, this is where I get dicey because I was moved a lot. So when people are like, who are you with? I'm like, What their patches looked like. I don't know the full ins and outs. So I'm working on getting that back so that I can tell it accurately because I believe it deserves that type of respect. But that being said, I'm. Still trying to wrap my brain around all of this.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Infantry to go in and out of, for Armor to go in and out of, special ops go in and out of them. They fly, they'll stop there. They'll pick people up or do whatever, then they'll go out. So it's a Ford observation basis is used essentially to have eyes in that area without having to be doing patrols every five seconds.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when you're in Canada, when you're in Kanderheart, when you're at CAF, you're fairly insulated away from the main walls. You would hear stuff go off, or you would hear the rocket sirens would go off. So you would hear and everyone just kind of got down on the ground and just waited for the all-clear and then got back up. I didn't hear any actual live fire until I got to the fob. It was more just a lot of noise you would hear a lot of helicopters, a lot of planes going in and out of the base. So there was that sense you could feel the ground shake when they took off. But there was that sense, you know, things were going around, things were happening. You just weren't far enough. We were not close enough to the edges of CAF to see it.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's why I feel bad when I'm trying to explain to you because it's hard because I don't know that I actually did grasp it until. I was in the air getting ready to land in Kandahar.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make weapons ready with the barrels of the ground, put your helmets on. That's when they start flying tactically, which means they're going between the mountains. That means we're going to land soon, which means if you're flying like this, it's because RPGs can hate you. So that was my first moment of, oh, I could like just be shot down right now. I didn't grasp it. I was, how old was I?”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I got to where we were before we were leaving to get on the plane, I don't really, real, I don't think I realized what the hell I was doing. Truthfully, like you're asking me all these, like, what did you feel? How did you like, when I really think about it, if I sit there and really think about it, I was deploying, I was aware, I knew what I was going to do, I knew my job. But once we actually stepped onto that hurk to leave to get into the Afghan airspace, I think that's when it hit me. It smacked me in the face so hard. And that's when the overwhelming just reality was that, oh, fuck. Oh, when they said”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was not a military expert, but I was a stunt expert, even though I didn't actually have to do any stunts. It's just because I had previous military experience and they were going to have me as an extra as a military person. But if you have previous experience, they have to make it as like a stunt role, like so you get paid more. So I got to sit at a desk and I was in that, you'd see me for like two seconds.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I watch Homeland. I watch, no, I watch a lot of documentaries. I watch, I like to watch real things more than just film. I did a little bit of film stuff when I got back into Canada. Was like once you've seen how it's made, I'm like, I don't want to do that.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, and where we were there, it was kind of cute. We were like in a base within a base, and they had like turf and we had like ice cream and fruit. And you could go get on a computer. You could go make calls. You had showers. You had a real bed. It was very kind of okay for that point. And then you got all your stuff. And then, okay, we're rolling out, which is about a five-hour flight.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I just say it's somewhere overseas You go there, and you go there for a couple days. I think it's like a day or two, and that's where you get your kit. That's where you get your bulletproof plates for the first time and realize how heavy those fucking things are. It's where you get your weapon and your ammunition, your first few megs. It's where you get your helmet and your vests and you get everything that you need while you're there. It's pretty nonchalant. It's hot as hell. It's your first time being in that kind of heat. So you just never stop sweating. The place we're in, it's just the second you got out of the shower, you were still wet after you got out of it. What the hell is happening? It's so humid. And I'm like, is this going to be like this in Afghanistan? They're like, no, it's not humid there at all. I'm like, why is this so bad here? Like, it'll be fine. Don't worry about it.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you leave, the day you leave, we left Quebec, we got driven to the airport, and then we walked onto the tarmac and we load our own bags and we got on a plane and it's just empty. It's just, it's our plane, right? And you don't go right to Afghanistan. You go to a stopover point, which I don't know if I'm allowed to say where that is, frankly.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm on the ground. Don't worry about the boats. So I didn't know how the Air Force deployed. I knew VACTSA was deploying in April. You were going Get ready. That was that.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was an understanding that we were going to always be deploying next year. It was like 2009, you're deploying. Whether you left in May or April, we were deploying because that was the rotation time. So each Canadian unit did between six and nine months. And then you knew right around that point another base of individuals would then deploy. So you would go on these rotations. And so even when I was on my deployment then, I was slated to go again the following year, but towards the end of the year. There was always a rotation. If you were in a combat arms unit and you were in one that was a deployable unit, so if you were from Edmonton, a PPCLI, which were, you know, the Princess Patricia's, which were their infantry unit, if you were RCR out of Petawawa, Ontario, you knew you were deploying. If you were at Vakitze, you knew you were deploying. There's combat arms bases and then there's like naval bases. I didn't know their deployment structure. I didn't know how they were.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They knew. So, what had happened is the reason that Veck had say the unit needed more people. So they came to that and they picked five people. There was five English speaking people that went to Vecitza. It wasn't just myself. There was a couple other people I knew that were English speaking that got put on other guns within the regiment. I wasn't with any of them. We all kind of got split up. And so.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having ammunition on you, you've got your weapon with you all the time when you're on base, and in fact saying Quebec, you're just like an everyday job.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it was more part of the training. I was excited to go because I did know that we were going to do some live fire. I did know that we were going to be doing more of the military type job I thought we were going to be doing because up until that point I had just done training. So I was learning how to march and salute and who to salute and not salute. Like that was the focus of that was my experience of the military. And then the next experience was sitting in a regiment just working out a lot and going for breakfast a lot and drinking. Like that was so I was like, this is the army. So when I actually got to go to Wayne Wright, I got my first full taste of, okay, well, there's fire picket duty. So one person gets picked every night to, you know, do sentry. There's a little less sleep. You're eating out of a canteen now. You're drinking out of canteen. You're in your kit more. You're in your deployable kit. Now you're in your, you know, you're wearing your tack vest. You're getting ready to practice having plates on.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Civilians. Oh, 100%. Yeah. And women were a great way to get close to the soldiers. Because women seem non-threatening when you see a burqa walk up to you, you're not expecting an AK 47 to roll out of that. Or, you know, but there are great ways to get close.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, 100%. IED's suicide bombers, vehicle-borne IEDs, their standard way to hit people really was IEDs and vehicle borne IEDs, suicide bombers. They'd put like backpacks full of an ID and then put like toys around it and then just be like.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can feel when you're shot, and then there's a little camera in the screen in front of it, and it's got button options. And so it's to mimic if you get shot, it'll say gunshot wound, and then you have to choose, okay, do I do this or do I do this? And depending on your response, person dies or lives. And they have other people who aren't on a rotation for deployment come and act as the Taliban and attack you Middle of the night”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then we go to Wainwright, Alberta, often called or referenced as Waincock, because it sucks so bad. It is a massive open space in Alberta, which most of Alberta is, and it's outside of a small town called Wainwright. And it is a field X training area for all of the Canadian military. And it's where you do live fire, but you also do workup training. So you go out there for a month or two, I think it is. I don't remember the exact time we were there because it was just, you sleep in a tent, you're in your cot, you're in like full mission mode, and you go outside and we did this operation called Operation Maple Leaf, I think it was. And you put on these little suits, they have haptic.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would think so. I mean, it looks like it's hot like you're out in the middle of nowhere, very similar terrain. That's the first time we started to get to where our tan boots and our tan, like our combat tan stuff before you couldn't wear that. So it gave us an opportunity to kind of break in how we were going to be doing this, what it was going to look like, how the guns were going to work, and all of those lovely things.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, we went into a classroom and they're like, These are the animals that are in the wildlife in Texas. If you see any of them, do not approach. Do not go pee outside. Do not squat down. It is snake season people. And I was like, I have to pee and squat down.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh god, no. We fly right into the tarmac, and they're like, don't touch the snakes. And then they send you out to the field.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That much for me because to shoot one of those and to know that you've done your job right means that you've helped. And that to me was really what it did it for me. When you hear your sergeant say, mission accomplished, target hit, tired acquired, then you're like. That's a good feeling. That's the stuff.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's symbiotic. It's a beautiful thing to watch, to know that a gun can fire and it takes kind of a dance to make it work. There's something about that to me that just got my heart racing. When you actually shoot the round and you see it go and you hear it, it's unlike it. You can't describe. There's no, I've never felt another feeling. I've also never been in like. F18 or an F like 16 or like any. I've never been in anything like that. And I've, you know, I've never tried to think of something else that'd be comparable. I've never been in like a Formula One car. Those are the only things I can picture being.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have a Carl go stuff beside your face like this and it shoots around, it gives you a concussive blast. Also, there's new research being done. I'll find out exactly what it is, but there's new research that's being done that shows that if you're an artillery gunner and you stand within a certain range of that gun, you get the same amount of concussive blasts and there's a range. I had no idea, but you feel it when it goes off. Like it hurt your whole body feels it.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not all perfectly accurate, and that's what irritates me, though, is because I'm Bothers me when I can't remember things accurately, but I have a lot of, I've had a lot of memory issues and problems after like having too many hits to the head.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then once they're on, depending if it's a time release or not, you would take this little thing and you would move it the top. And that would, it's almost like a little timer. Yeah, it depend”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I'm talking about the round itself. So you would put a fuse on top of the round. So you would unload the ammo and then you would put fuses on them. And the fuses are on the top and they're like a little ice cream topper kind of thing. And you would spin those on.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just a little one because it's a tiny little hole and you just got to click it to where it's supposed to go. And it depended on what the call was for. Was a tim”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, there's a loop. So, what you would do, you get the fire mission, you would find out the rounds. The two IC would be standing by the rounds, and it was his job to make sure the amount of rounds that was told would be the only rounds that would go downrange. And so he'd stand there. And on each round, depending on the type of round, is a fuse, which gets screwed onto the top of the round. So they're about that big and it's just a point. And then you would have to put it on, give it a spin. And depending if it was the time release, you had a little, um, Called, you get those at Ikea when you have to build everything. Al”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So and so, 10 rounds fire when ready, and then you would get your rounds ready and everyone would have them ready and be in their respective positions. And then you would wait. And then they would say, fire when ready. And as soon as I say fire when ready, that means just start going. Just start. And then that's when the magic starts.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You roll up in your trucks, in your, you're, you know, you've got each group of people, you've got two trucks, and then you've got like a medic vehicle, and then you've got like an officer vehicle and a comms vehicle, and you go to your prospective guns, and then you offload your ammo, and then you basically wait for them to send you a fire mission. Wow, get that together. They would call, they would say, and Mission sit, so it would be a fire mission. So we'd wait for that. And once we got that, then you all run like a bunch of scattered rats to the gun. Like it's like the greatest thing you've ever seen. And then you just wait. You wait for the call for the sergeants to say. And then you'll hear it because it's not headphones. You can hear it on a speaker. And it'd be like, I'm not going to do in French. Don't ask. It'd be like.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't get it towards the end until towards the end. So that was fortunate. So we would fire live fire, we would go out to the middle of nowhere. The guns would be there and we would get offload a truck of rounds and we would do live fire and we would practice, just constant practice. What's that saying? Perfect practice makes perfect.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Playing ball hockey for a few hours in the gym or lifting weights together or, you know, just going on a ruck march along ruck march, just stuff like that. You would have a shower, you would meet, and then you would just sit around the regiment. You would just sit around the regiment and you would, if there was busy work, you'd mop the floors, you would clean weapons. There wasn't a whole lot until there was a whole lot to do We did a lot for a while, and then we went away on workup training to Texas for a week. We came down here and we did live fire with our other troop that was going to be with us. So Alpha had two guns and two guns has two groups of people. And so we all would go down to Texas and we did live fire here for a week. I ended up getting gastro, which was awesome. So thanks for that.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2007 on, Canada really started taking a combat role before it was very much more a UN type deal where doing what we normally do in most wars where we just wear blue and we don't shoot anyone. And so we're there to help. And so they were really, they were scaling up. And there wasn't a lot of people in those trades initially, I think, when the war kind of started. So Canada really started to scale. And so when I got to Quebec, Kind of found out, yeah, we're deploying. And it was a weird situation because I've never actually been at a unit on a non deployable unit. So I don't know what they do day to day. That's different from what I did. I just know what I did. So we would do things like in the morning, we would get up and we would meet for PT at 5 a.m. And that would include going for a 10K run or”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for the buildup for the deployment, I was in Quebec, and my unit was deploying from Quebec. And at that time, you kind of get your marching orders. You know you're deploying. I knew I was deploying before I even graduated. That's how much they needed people. So once I did all that training on graduation parade day, a couple men from Quebec in uniforms came over and said, you, you, you, and you are all being posted to Bakytse, and you're going to deploy with us in April. So that's how I found out I was deploying.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. Oh, God, no. There's a boardwalk. There's hockey there. Like floor hockey because Canada had to have that. There's a Tim Hortons of Subway, a Pizza Hut, a PX. I think there's a restaurant there somewhere, but I never, I didn't get to go. Stuff like that. There's gyms. You can run around it. You feel fairly safe. You always have a weapon on you, but you can, you know, live your life. When you get out to the fob, the guns are already there. So those M triple sevens get lifted by a Chinook. Normally, if they're going by air, they go by Chinook because they're heavy as hell. And chinooks can hook them under the bottom and they fly them and then they'll drop them down. They have wheels on them, but you don't need them if you're going to leave it in place.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't want to move them When we got to Kandaharp, we were there for a couple days. We got flown out to the fog. We were going to be at forward observation base. Kandahar is the safe space or was the major base in Afghanistan that we were at. There's things like Tim Hortons there. There's Canada House. There's a British side, an American side, a Canadian side. And, you know, that's where you see all the different countries in the world kind of come together. You would see Italians, you would see Germans, you would see French, you would see all these different uniforms, and you never know who to salute because you don't know what each thing means.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends if you're moving it by ground, you're moving it on a truck, and when you're moving it on a truck, you're hooking the back of it onto, you're hooking the front of the barrel onto one of those big transport looking trucks that has those cargo tents that's got soldiers in it. You don't want to ever move an M777 by that way if you don't have to. The barrel's worth a million dollars.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, because you're Russian, but like if somebody walked up to me and was like, Hey, Kelsey, I like you. I'd be like, ah, God, he's gonna put me in a camp.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, M777 does because it's an obvious howitzer, I'm sure, has a separate word, but like if you're running it, you're running it in French. So, like, when I'd be running the When I'm doing the charge bags and I'm doing Doing, you know, I'm loading everything and I'm getting that ready, and that's my position that day. I'm also controlling the breach. So, like, how it opens, how it closes when it locks. And so, but you have to yell that as you do it. So you're yelling like Malebulas. You have to yell all these things, you have to learn them though. And so for a long time, it was a little frustrating, I won't lie.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking about the artillery guns, so those things, though, what you would find fascinating is just how they break down when you have to take one of those apart. I think your mind would really find it fascinating how a breach comes apart all the way down to like ball-bearing size. And the only, and there's a way to just make that gun completely ineffective. And all you have to do when you're on the charge side, there's a magazine that's a long linear magazine and it holds like 15 little rounds. If you just take that thing out, nothing's not firing.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So ship pump is a term that we use in Canada to call somebody useless. A ship pump is a useless soldier who is just, you're there and that's the ship pump. And so we all just deal with it. But somehow they're still there.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you do that, it alleviates a misfire, essentially, because if you just pull it sometimes, that's not enough, you got to really give it your whole body into it. And so he would train me on. How to do things differently so that I could do them effectively. And I wasn't a ship”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The side that had the charge bags. I'll explain that in a second. But if I was running the side that had the charge bags, I could step up onto the gun. And if I leaned inward enough with my right hand with the charge and I kind of kicked off, I could kind of jump and shove it up the tube. Almost enough. Yeah. If I was running the Lanyard, which is the thing that makes it go boom, it's really easy. It's a long rope. You hook it on and you put your right hand on your hip and on your left and you hold it there and you just stare at your sergeant like this and you just wait for him to yell fire. And he points at you when he does it. And when you do it, you turn your whole body with it.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's your task now. Make me be five foot three. That'd be great. For artillery, really what it came down to was the unit when I got there, there was only a couple people who spoke any sort of English and my sergeant was not one of them. But once he kind of started to get to know me a little bit the best that he could, he started to put effort into making sure I could lift the rounds, train, make sure my capacity to do my job was there. And so he took me under his wing in that aspect. So he would take me to the gym with him and he would show me exercises that would specifically help me load the round. So pick the round up from the ground, pick it up like a trick to put your knee under it, use your legs instead of just pick it up, use your back, blow your back out. He would work on that. And then depending on the position I was running the gun in, if I was running.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that I'd realize it was difficult while I was doing it because that's just the way it's been. I've always been the short person. That's life. Nothing I can do to fix that. So there was no point, when am I going to whine about it? I'm going to break my femurs and insert things to make me grow a little bit. Maybe since you're in robotics, you can figure that out.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it goes like private in the north, like in an infantry or in a regular unit, it's like private corporal, master corporal sergeant. In artillery, it goes gunner, bombardier, master bombardier, sergeant weren't and off like that. So you have two people, but the serge is like, you don't move till he says move, you don't fire till he says fire. Like he's your guy. He'll give you the coordinates. He'll feed him to the guy that's doing the GPS that portion. I really never did it much. I wasn't tall enough to see it, like legitimately the way how high it is up on the gun. Like it was, I couldn't see clearly enough. It was not good.”
2021-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source