There was some more violence around Al Asad over the past 36 hours, including four casualties, one of them another DOA. I know that this was a firefight, but I don’t have any details as to where, who, etc. They don’t tell us much here. I’m not sure whether this new violence represents a trend in the Anbar province, or just a couple of blips on the radar. Let’s hope the latter.

Either way, it has yanked all of us squarely back into reality. It is easy for me to convince myself that I am on a “safe” base in a “safe” war, and I have noted a bit of complacency in the citizens of our Forward Operating Base—seemingly “paranoid” rules like the injunction against any bags in the DFAC are ignored without consequence (until I point it out), and I occasionally see soldiers walking around post without a weapon in tow. But this is, in fact, a war zone, and we are, actually, in real danger here. When I ride my bike around the fourteen-mile loop, I can see places in the road, lots of them, where mortars have hit in the not-too-distant past. Earlier in 2008, there was a bomb set off in a DFAC in Ramadi, and there have been a couple of car bombs on or near Army posts in the last couple of months.

I am blessed to be a Fobbit in a well-protected place, where the flow of patients to my clinic is generally mundane and predictable. I expect that life will continue this way, with a few of these incidents occasionally peppering the landscape. But I am not guaranteed anything, by any stretch, and incidents like the recent ones provide a sobering reminder to each of Al Asad-ians that although we are in a relatively safe location, we’re still surrounded by people who want to kill us.