One Month Down

March 27th was my one month mark for my deployment and while the days seem to have gone by quickly, it feels like much longer than one month ago that I boarded a flight from San Antonio to Fort Benning. Instead of moving at an exhaustive pace on a day to day basis, I've now been able to settle into a routine of working at the ER at Camp Cropper. I'm here with two other ER doctors staffing the emergency room 24/7. It makes for a tiring schedule - the number of hours isn't overly oppressive but switching between days and nights can take its toll.


For right now our schedule goes like this: work 7a-7p, work 7a-1p, work 7p-7a, work 7p-7a, work1p-7a, then rinse and repeat. I've become accustomed sleeping whenever I can these days but my internal clock is completely screwed up. On the last night shift that I worked I found myself staring at the ceiling for three hours in the call room (at night we only treat true emergencies). Frustrated, and thinking about how much I didn't want to go to the gym after my shift was over I walked over to the gym to work out. There's nothing like doing some curls at 4am to help you realize how tired you actually are.

For all the miles in-between me and the real world, things are remarkably the same. Patients come in, get seen, some get some life saving intervention and they are either admitted or discharged. Medications are given and charts are written. It's easy to forget when you're in the bubble of the hospital that there is this whole incredible operation going on around you. Then I walk out the front door to go back to my room and a random stimulus helps to refocus me. It could be hearing the firing range, or watching the Blackhawks fly over my head, or the large T-walls that seem to go on to infinity that snap me back into the reality that I'm in Baghdad.

"I'm in Baghdad." I must say that to myself a couple of times a day. To me it still seems so weird to think about. Every time I do, I think back to a particular memory in my life during the first Gulf War. I must've been around 10 at the time and I can remember watching the news with my parents about the impending war with Iraq. To a ten year old distance is a somewhat obtuse subject. Yea I knew that Iraq was far away - I mean definitely further than Philly. Just how far, as a 10 year old, I had no concept. So when the thunderstorm hit later that night and I came running into my parent's bedroom, I was glad to be consoled by the fact that the war was nowhere near Oradell. It was in fact thousands of miles away, in a place that might as well have been the dark side of the moon for a ten year old American. I remember thinking, after my initial fears had been laid to rest, that I was very thankful that all this was going on so far away, and hoped that it would never hit close to home. Then 9/11, and a deployment 20 years later literally in the heart of that once far away city, Baghdad. It's funny how life goes sometimes.

One encouraging thing about being here is that communication is pretty reliable. The internet is slow (sometimes I feel like I'm back using the old dial-up AOL), but it's good enough for writing emails. Phone calls are easy enough as well, and though they require a calling card it isn't that expensive. Being able to talk to Rachel almost daily has kept me grounded and upbeat. The actual process of calling, on the other hand, can always be a little annoying.

AT&T has set up little huts here with about 10 to 15 pay phones in them, and they are almost always pretty near full. And there appears to be some regulation that at all times, and without fail, there must be someone on the phone who is a loud talker. I haven't found the exact regulation yet, but I assume it's on the back of the phone card I bought, probably in the fine print. We aren't talking about bad connections here either; the person on the other end of the phone might as well be in the other room during most conversations. The net effect of one loud talker is that the person next to him has to then become a loud talker, and shortly, after all the dominos fall, the room sounds like a bar on New Year’s Eve.

One loud talker in particular seems to be my AT&T nemesis. He is nearly always in the room when I go to make a call - I'm beginning to suspect that someone sent him there as a prank - maybe next time I'll grab the phone from him just to see if there is really anyone on the other side. What makes it worse is that he is one of our translators, and speaks Arabic during his phone calls. Now I'll admit my ignorance, but there is something inherently terrifying about a man shouting Arabic into a phone on a military installation. I mean Arabic is the new German. Throughout my life, whenever I thought about the scariest language, it was German. The bad guys in all the movies had German accents, so in the battle of scary dialects, German took the cake. Of late, Arabic has come close to taking over the throne.

On this particular occasion, I just wasn't in the mood to try and have a conversation over this guy so after imputing half of my pin number to begin to make a call I just hung up the phone. I grabbed my cap, and shaking my head I headed towards the door. The conversation the man was having now got to a fevered pitch as I got closer and I thought to myself, "Well, I guess this is it Greg, just wait for the bang." As I got to the man he spun around in his chair and looked crazily at me, apologized and said, "I'm sorry Sir for being so loud, but I just found out that I'm a Grandfather!" I congratulated the man for his achievement, and then myself for being such an ass.