How to Blow Off Your Arm for Fun and Profit

Chapter 4: Blowing Off Your Arm

5 min readNov 15, 2018

This is Chapter 4 of my series Club 44, my true story of having the world’s craziest prison job.

We sort of did and didn’t have access to Air Force resources. Our work sometimes involved heavy equipment or small tools like chainsaws and power augers. All of these things needed maintenance, and we had a well equipped shop for doing this. All the shop needed was a proper mechanic.

For a long time we’d had a mechanic. He was an old car nut, used to rebuilding hot rods in his normal life, and applied that same passion to weed whackers and zero-turn mowers at Vandenberg. But his out date finally came and he was shipped home, leaving us with a hole in our team. The rest of us weren’t “allowed” to do mechanical work because we weren’t “trained” on it. Nobody ever actually received any real training for anything, but it was a CYA (Cover Your Ass) thing and Sammy was not keen on losing his job. So, if there was a bolt that needed tightening, we needed to refrain from tightening it, even if that meant the tool fell apart in our hands. We became real government employees.

And so Sammy was on the prowl for a replacement mechanic. He gave word to Big Tuna to send him any mechanic who came in as fresh fish (you’ll need to read the earlier chapters if any of that doesn’t make sense). Finally one did — an experienced professional mechanic. He was given a red suit and told to get on the bus the next morning.

But then, word got out that he was not just any mechanic; he was a former Air Force mechanic! We were stoked because it meant we’d finally get our stuff kept up by someone who knew what he was doing. But Big Tuna didn’t feel that way. We soon heard that the new mechanic had been pulled, because of his Air Force experience. The explanation was that he was likely to have too much familiarity with Air Force procedures — in other words, he was too precisely qualified for the job. Familiarity with Air Force procedures meant — to someone — that he would teach us all how to scam free stuff from the Airmen, or how to woo the general’s daughter, or how to steal a C-17 and all escape to Fiji, or god knows what. So we were, again, without a mechanic.

So finally along came the next guy. He was a great big red bearded retiree, loud and bellowing, who never overheard a conversation that he didn’t need to take over. This guy talked your ear off. And then the other ear. You could have a private conversation a mile away and he’d come running to take the lead in it. Terry became installed as our new mechanic.

He was not there long.

Terry was working in the shop one day, and had the front wheel of one of our mowers off. These wheels were to be inflated to no more than 10 psi. Terry was chatting with an Airman while he had our 250 psi milspec air system plugged into the tire to fill it up, checking the pressure as he talked.

“What do you think this thing should be, about 50?”

Famous last words. Before the Airman could blink, the tire exploded. It was like a stick of dynamite going off. The steel rim shot 20 feet up to the ceiling, ricocheted back down and struck the Airman on top of the head (amazingly he was not seriously hurt). The tire itself was completely atomized, as was Terry’s forearm.

A word about the procedures governing emergency medical care for our happy team of red suited laborers. Under no circumstances were we allowed to be given medical care by the Air Force. They had emergency services and a hospital and ambulances all on base, but if we were to ever be assisted by them, the presumption was that we’d pickpocket the paramedics, or steal drugs from the hospital, or put rubber gloves over our heads and blow them up like felonious five fingered balloons. If any of us were ever injured, the Air Force was to call the prison and allow the prison to handle it.

Here’s how that would go down, because I personally witnessed it on multiple occasions. The base phoned the prison. Someone at the prison would then try and phone the nurse who came in once a week to distribute medication. The nurse would eventually come in to see about the emergency. By then, someone from the base would have driven the sick or injured inmate back to the prison. The nurse would assess his condition, and then decide whether to call emergency services. If the injury did not warrant emergency services, the inmate would generally be sent to the SHU for 30 days as punishment for not properly following safety procedures and having the gall to become sick or injured.

One of our guys once had a cardiac event of some kind while on base, as he was elderly. He was driven back to the prison by a teenaged Airman who undoubtedly did his best, but the poor old guy was unconscious by the time they arrived. The COs laid him on the ground in the parking lot. It was a long time before the nurse arrived, a long time to lay on that hot pavement in the sun with no pulse. She was unable to find vital signs, so they put handcuffs and shackles on him — because that’s what you should do when one is close to death. They called 9–1–1, the firemen arrived, were unable to revive him, and transported him. He was dead, of course. But at least he wouldn’t get away in those shackles.

This was business as usual. This was the correct procedure. Any deviation from this risked the Air Force’s contract with the prison.

With his many years of experience, Sammy was well aware of this. When he saw the condition of what remained of Terry’s arm, and the rate at which blood was being lost, he put Terry in his truck and broke every speed limit driving him directly to the hospital. Sammy was a normal fucking person, and could give a shit about someone yelling at him when there was a life that needed to be saved. I’m sure the prison did try to give him a hard time, but as he didn’t work for them, and as he obviously had the moral high ground, I doubt they went very far with it. Big Tuna probably spent that night drinking and raging to himself in his single-wide.

I saw Terry again a few months later, at a distance — after he was out of the hospital and did his 30 days in the SHU for violating safety procedures. His arm was all wrapped up, but it looked like all of it was there. We knew the credit for that went to Sammy.

How to Blow Off Your Arm for Fun and Profit

Chapter 4: Blowing Off Your Arm

Written by Dalton Bennett