Greetings from Balad,

It has been along time since I have written, I know, I know! My audience has suffered. I have been busying myself at work, and off; with other projects to keep busy. I’m pretty settled in my temporary lifestyle as of late, and it may come as news to you that I have passed the halfway point in this deployment. As I write this I sit at 57 days until I leave Iraq.


I tried to give a gift of medical supplies to the hospital in the city of Balad as a humanitarian gesture but bureaucracy stymied me. I had about one thousand dollars of equipment that was of no use to us. It’s not that it was expired or useless but just that it didn’t mesh well with our anesthesia practice. I met and spoke with the head MD from the hospital, and he was very cordial. H aid he would be glad to receive the supplies; and at that point I should have given him the stuff. But I decided to do the right thing and file a request and pass it through Logistics. Whatever, I may as well have burnt the whole pallet of junk and let the smoke waft out over the city for all the good it did. Now the supplies have to be entered into a database to see if anyone in the DoD wants the stuff first, And once I declared it “excess” Logistics took possession of it. It disappeared into their warehouse never to be seen again. I knew not to go through channels; I knew it in my heart. But I did anyway, and got burned.

Despite my humanitarian endeavor falling through, things have been OK here. I instituted a policy for the administration of blood to trauma patients upon arrival, in the Emergency Dept. We used to have to wait for a paperwork shuffle to be completed before we could get emergency blood products. I determined that this might have contributed to a poor outcome for some patients. I spent about a week steering my policy through several departments to get it implemented. The funny thing about it is that all it says is that the blood bank needs to bring two units of un-crossmatched O+ blood to any and all traumas. Nothing fancy, if we don’t need it they walk back the thirty feet to the fridge and put it away. So simple, but I’m convinced that just by having it on hand the Emergency docs are more likely to administer it right away instead of waiting for the anesthesia department to do it during the surgery. So many of our casualties have already bled-out in the field that when they get to us they are very nearly ex-sanguinated.

J. Stormo and I got a Humvee the other day and ‘went-a-four-wheelin’ across the base (rebel yell goes here). We drove down to see the remnants of Saddam’s airforce.
Picture a long dusty road strewn with junk; the unsalvageable parts of wrecked weapons systems. Midway down that road lie about ten wrecked fighter jets, all soviet made; Covered ignominiously in American graffiti. We climbed around them for a while and took some pictures. Air force specialists tried to fire all the ejection seats, about a year ago, but stopped when one airman lost some fingers. Stormo and I wisely stayed out of the cockpits. Further down that road we saw the place where we store wrecked vehicles of our own. Bradleys, Humvees, and up-armored trucks, all the elements of our convoys blown apart with such violence you could hardly imagine. I saw the armor of a Bradley fighting vehicle melted like candle wax and dripped down across steel tracks in shiny silver rivulets. I counted at least five medical vehicles destroyed. I know they are medical because of the huge red crosses painted on them, but our enemies targeted them anyway. Two of the destroyed vehicles were the ubiquitous blue Air force ambulance buses many of my readers know from flying air-evac. These buses were totaled. One had a huge crater blown up through the floor and its heavy I-beam chassis was twisted and broken. Stormo and I were pissed.

It was a good day anyway, despite what we saw. The smoke from the burn pit was drifting away from the base and we took that hummer through dirt, mud and gravel burning up both rubber and fuel before stopping at Popeye’s for chicken and biscuits.

I know, it’s a strange war experience for those of us at Balad.