Been an eventful couple of days in the ol’ dust bowl.

I wrote in my last (real) post about my trip to the camp of Turkish national Mr K. He came to the clinic on Monday to bring another worker by, and invited us to eat some fresh fish around a fire next weekend, which will be great. Any and all changes to the norm are most welcome here in Al Asad, where every day is groundhog day. A few e-mailers asked me for more info about Mr K, so here’s what I can tell you. He is born/raised in Turkey, and runs a construction team which lays down new roads and resurfaces old ones. Mr K’s crew actually spends most of their daylight hours off-post, building roads in areas of the Anbar province near Al Asad. Although there has been less violence in this part of the country for the past year, it was actually one of the most dangerous areas a couple of years ago, and there are plenty insurgent-types in the area still. Mr K has lost workers to IED blasts, and the work they do, even today, is done under heavy protection. The entire crew sleeps on post every night for their own safety. I’ll have a bit of one-on-one time with Mr. K when we get together again next week, and am excited to hear some of his personal story.

Due to some personnel issues which have arisen in our company (the 581st Area Support Medical Company, which is spread out over a few bases here in Iraq), the other health care provider, nurse practitioner LTC Bullock-Price, is right now on a plane, headed to another post. Thus, I have been a “lone man” in the clinic for the past few days, with my NP and my optometrist both away. That means that I saw every single patient in the clinic, including the eye patients (though I deferred everything on the latter except for the acute cases). LTC’s replacement will be a CPT from another post, who may be here by Friday (I hope), or possibly not until next week. We shall see.

During this period of transition, our Company Commander (CPT Allen) came up to see us, and was accompanied by my good friend MAJ Tanya Wroblewski. Tanya went through fellowship training with me at Walter Reed, along with another Army fellow (Tony Fadell, who has had a few cameos in this blog), and a Navy fellow (Colleen Dorrance). Fellowship is a singularly miserable and overwhelmingly busy three years, and the four of us spent most of our waking hours in the company of each other every day from July 2002 through June 2004. In that kind of situation, you end up either loving or hating those who are thrust into the foxhole with you. I am thankful to say that we all got along beautifully, and were there for each other during the entirety of that grueling experience. Colleen, Tony, and Tanya all turned out to be people of great integrity and genuine selflessness, and this combined to make the experience tolerable for all of us, as we made sacrifices for one another whenever necessary. I honestly cannot remember a single unkind word that passed between any of us, and I will always have a soft spot in my heart for each of those three great people.

Seeing Tanya was a nice trip down memory lane, and she updated me on all the happenings at WallyWorld. Last night, 1LT Coleman and I took Tanya and CPT Allen to the airport, and saw them off, as they headed back from whence they had come. When getting ready to board the plane, Tanya readied her body armour, and lifted her overstuffed military backpack. I noticed a small canvas pouch attached to the bottom of the pack, and asked her about it. She unzipped it and opened it up for each of us to see, saying something about the great importance of the items in that pouch. Looking in, I saw thread and knitting needles. When I have down time in an airport, I am usually reaching for the laptop or a newspaper, but MAJ Tanya Wroblewski is knitting, making things for her kids. That tells you a lot about the kind of person she is: a mom first, with “soldier/doctor” coming in pretty far afterwards. Tanya has two months left in country, and is counting down the days when she’ll be able to see her husband and two young kids (toddler and infant) again. Yet another reminder for me that the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines out here are more than camo-wearing, gun-toting, Humvee-riding abstractions for politicians to talk about, but real, actual human beings, each with a different story, and each with specific, often painful sacrifices he/she is making to be here.