I’ll Put That On The List Of Things That Would Have Been Useful To Know Yesterday

The first day at Camp Cropper, my new home for the next several months, was somewhat of a blur. After arriving at BIAP, otherwise known as Baghdad International Airport, we waited around for about twenty minutes for someone to pick us up and drive to the base. We piled those heavy bags once more into yet another mode of transportation and drove for about ten minutes to our base.


Our first lodging was actually at Camp Stryker which is located adjacent to Camp Cropper. We unloaded our things into our rooms that looked like small prefabricated trailers. They seemed to go on forever and are surrounded by large cement walls about one foot think and 15 feet high to protect against mortar attacks. As I entered my room for the first time I was surprised to find that my roommate was Shane Summers from the same hospital that I work at in San Antonio.

Shane had definitely drawn the short straw on this whole deployment thing. He graduated from Brooke Army Medical Center one year before I finished at UMDNJ and had just completed a one year fellowship in Emergency Ultrasound. However, even though he had been told that he would be stationed at Fort Sam Houston, the Army also informed him that he would be deployed to Iraq before ever working one shift in the ER there. I had met him only briefly last July when I started working at BAMC and I remembered thinking how much it sucked that he was getting deployed before even working.

I honestly hadn’t thought about him again until I saw his face looking back at me as I opened the door. It was a combined look of surprise and sheer joy – he now knew that his replacement had arrived and that his 6 month sentence in Iraq was about to come to an end. In fact, as I write this now he is probably back in San Antonio.

Even though I was operating on no sleep for greater than 30 hours since leaving Kuwait, the Sergeant didn’t even give us time to unpack. He insisted on driving us up to hospital for a tour and to meet who we would be working with. For those of you that know me well I’m sure you can picture the face that I made!

Two hours into our tour and introductions I began to think that the Army may be trying some new interrogating technique on us – water boarding couldn’t be this bad. We were all so tired I would’ve have given any one who asked the pin for my ATM card, my social security number and whatever other vital information they were interested in. Finally, the DCCS (kind of like a CEO for the hospital) mentioned that maybe we should go back and try and take a nap.

Back at the room the three of us decided to sleep for a couple of hours and then get up to check out the DFAC(cafeteria, and yes there will be an Army abbreviation quiz in a future post!). I unrolled my sleeping bag and fell to sleep instantly. Sleep never felt so good! We did manage to get up for dinner and then head right back to our rooms to go to sleep for the night. Nothing could wake me up tonight…

BOOM…BOOM…tatatatat…BOOM. Ok, I’m up, I’m up. In my sleep deprived stupor I had no idea where I was or how long I had been sleeping but the sound right outside of my door was unmistakable. Something was being blown up or fired at, that I knew for sure. I just didn’t know what to do about it. Shane had gone to the hospital to work the night shift so there was no guidance there. As I pondered my options, I decided, not based on any training, that the safest place to be when attacked was on the floor. Lying on the cold and dirty floor I realized that even if it was the safest place I couldn’t stay there so I went to option two – grab my weapon.

So there I lay, my M9 resting on my chest (don’t worry it was not loaded), and suddenly all was quiet. “Well whatever it was,” I thought to myself, “It’s over now,” and promptly passed out once again. That is until the next flurry of salvos sounded over my head. Ok, this was getting a little crazy. Why was no one outside yelling? As quickly as it started, the noise stopped again. This nonsense happened three more times through the night, and each time my heart leaped out of my chest until my exhaustion took over.

The next morning at breakfast, my pride tucked firmly into my pockets I decided to ask the other doctors, who had been deployed once before, if we had been attacked last night. Clearly I should have waited until he had swallowed his gulp of OJ as it promptly came shooting out of his nostrils. When the laughing was over, they said, “Yea we probably should have told you about that yesterday.” Apparently, when the Humvee’s are heading out for their nightly patrols around Baghdad they test fire a couple of rounds right outside the gate to make sure that the weapons were functioning properly. Yea, that would’ve been nice to know yesterday.