Introducing The Field Desk

Welcome readers and collectors!

It’s been a long journey to get here, but The Field Desk has officially launched! But what is The Field Desk, you ask? Please indulge me in taking the scenic route towards answering that question.

I’ve read the classics and the greats. I did this out of a sense of obligation to be what wider society would consider “well read.” My shelf contains Hobbes and Descartes, Homer and Dante, Dostoyevsky and Hemingway. I’ve also got plenty of the pop fiction. Brad Thor, Gayle Rivers, Louis L’Amour. Reading has always been part of my life.

What I’ve enjoyed reading the most, however, is somewhat peculiar. Instructional material, field manuals, and even textbooks. It always felt like a spell book, in some sense; the ability to read something on the page and turn it into an actionable knowledge set for the real world. Some call it boring. Others call it a spectrum disorder.

Likewise, I’d always been drawn to the genres that included expedition and adventure. Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, the Mummy, and more. The characters have breadth, they’re competent, and they’re able to combine their wits with their talents to accomplish incredible things. I’ve admired that type of thematic fiction.

And then enters my military time. It’s not much of a resume, really. I was a 68W Combat Medic for a dozen years, entirely in the National Guard. I spent between four and five of those years on active orders between training, Iraq, natural disasters, or instructing. I was lucky to be in a few unit types. Engineers, Sappers, Medical, Infantry, and stints with a few others depending on my orders at the time. I got a few hundred patient contacts under my belt, trips to Europe and the Middle East, stateside jobs, and ended it all as an E6 that had plenty of Platoon Sergeant time. I did the nasty girl thing about as well as it can be done, I’d wager.

During and after that time, I was a serial hobby collector. I became a lead guitarist in a couple projects, got into autocross and other grassroots motorsports, the occasional USPSA match, overloading and thru-hiking, HAM radio, drone piloting, lock picking, auto brokering, oil painting, rock climbing, chess, and more. These days I’m upgrading my mountaineering skills, writing with the Integrated Skills Group, and now starting my first business.

Dabbling in a bit of everything is an existential necessity, as far as I’m concerned. One can only communicate and apply their objectivity to the extent of their horizons and learnings. It makes you applicable to any situation and likable to most anyone you meet. The James Bond mythos is certainly built in Aston Martins and seductive women – but his superpower is the ability to talk with experts in a manner that they don’t immediately suspect him of being an amateur.

This is the goal of the Field Desk, to create more Bonds. The type of people that end up in the throne room of a forgotten ruin that may know a bit about history, enough geography to be dangerous, and also the skills to use a piton and revolver if the daring escape required it.

Thus, I hope to provide the world with these texts; companion material for the everyday adventurer. I thank you for you the journey we’re about to take!

• Jake Wetuski, The Field Desk

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. – Robert A. Heinlein