As The Sparks Fly Upward

Friday was the Fourth of July here on Al Asad. For some reason (in retrospect probably unwarranted), I thought that this would be treated as a “special” day here, but ’twas (mostly) not to be. No one really expected any time off—we are, after all, in a war zone, and the bad guys certainly don’t stop doing their bad guy stuff on a United States’ holiday. But I though that maybe there would be a special meal or something, like there was on the Army’s birthday.

Nope. Nada. (Actually, there was a nice display at the Ripper DFAC, but food-wise: nothing)

So, we made our own. Early on Friday, word got out that the PX had received a shipment of steaks from America, and we quickly dispatched a medic with a lot of twenties in hand to go check it out. She came back with a bunch of frozen goodies, including a couple of ribeyes for me. At lunchtime, outside the clinic in the covered triage area, we had an old-fashioned barbie, with some good onion burgers (I ate one of those) and our various steaks. SGT Christie England of Middlebury, CT cooked mine (and another one which I bought for our optometrist) and it was truly fabulous. I’m not usually a fan of previously-frozen steak, but this was melt-in-my-mouth delicious. Definitely the best thing I have eaten since my arrival to The Brown Zone many months ago.

Clinic in the afternoon was completely dead, with only two patients (bilateral lower extremity swelling in a foreigner who may just have hepatitis C, and an allergic rash). Right after clinic I had planned to hit the Gym and work off some of that ribeye, but we got a report that the Ripper DFAC had Reuben sandwiches, and we have been waiting for those. 1LT Coleman, SPCs Villareal, Lee, and Santiago all went with us there, where we each ate a sandwich and brought a few home for our buddies. I also brought an entire carry-out container full of olives and pickles, as I have been craving salty things of late.

Because I had royally pigged-out on Friday, I vowed to do a couple of cardio/aerobic sessions on Saturday. Clinic was again very light, and afterwards, before anyone could whisk me in a truck and off to lunch, I snuck off to the gym. After lifting weights a bit, I did 6.5 miles on the treadmill, and then went home to eat lunch. A couple of hours later, I was meeting COL Gober to do the fourteen-mile bike loop. CPT Baker came with me, but when we met COL Gober at the clinic, he had to make some calls.

Turns out there had been a MASCAL at the hospital, a military term for multiple casualties coming in at once. The story is that a suicide bomber had gone into an Iraqi facility (police?) and blown himself up, and injured seven of the good guys. There were a number of internal injuries, one Iraqi with a severe leg artery laceration, but no deaths among the good guys. The bomber himself had been fatally wounded. When the COL called back to get results of a CT scan, one of the patients had a kidney issue, so he had to head back to the hospital so would not be making the ride with us. Baker and I went, and with the winds picking up, it ended up being a very tough ride, and by the end of it, I felt completely wasted. Once I was back home, I watched a rather uninteresting Yanks-Sox game, and fell asleep pretty early on.

I think that when I look back at this July fourth, it will be a memorable one, in spite of the lack of formal celebration. The experience which, I believe, will most spring to my mind is a sweet one: On Friday night, I went to our small LDS congregation’s Family Home Evening meeting, during which we read aloud the Declaration of Independence, and played some dominoes in the little shack-like annex off of the back of the main chapel. During our meeting, the Jewish congregation shared the annex with us and, a bit apart from us, sang some rousing, traditionally Jewish-sounding songs in Yiddish. I will add that to the many surreal experiences I have had out here: a bunch of Latter-day Saints on one side of a slap-dash plywood building in the desert mountains of Iraq, with a gathering of Jewish soldiers on the other end, all of us acting out that most American of pursuits: the praising of God in accordance with our own consciences. Served well to remind me of the reasons why our forefathers declared independence in the first place.