Where I live and play...

Brian asked to talk about where we live. The best way to describe my little community is to call it a mining town. Where instead of scruffy miners, there are clean cut young men and women carrying fully automatic weapons. Mostly we are all in tents, called GP Mediums (General Purpose). Some of the tents have been covered with this foam stuff that provides insulation from weather and noise. It makes those tents look like big, tan, melted marshmallows. The streets are either dirt roads, which turn into mud pits in the winter or are covered with big rocks. Our compound is surrounded by 14' tall barriers called "Hesco's". Why they are called Hescos, I have no idea. All of the tents are built up on wood platforms, we have electricity and A/C or heaters. Funny thing is that the A/C is super cold and the heater is super hot, so trying to find a balance is really tough. Especially when the control box to the unit is in the nurses tent. This makes it so that we have to always be nice or they can freeze us or cook us!

I am trying to up load a picture of the front of our FST tent. This is a tent where we do all of our evaluations, resuscitations, surgeries and use the back 3rd as an ICU/PACU area. We are fortunate to have a good working relationship with the medical company and we work and play together a lot. As our unit is not part of the 10th Mountain Division (the guys who currently run the base), we are often forgotten about when it comes to upgrading our areas. The "fixed" structures on the FOB are all made out of 1" plywood, giving the place a real "old west" feel to it. The current plan that is underway is to build a run way that will be able to bring in lots of supplies and build up a large base here. That is a long, long way away. However, every time we ask the current land lords for any kind of upgrade we are met with, "Why? When the runway is built you will be moved down there anyway."

For the time being I am working on just being content with what we have, though primitive as it may be. It could always be worse! We could have split our FST sending half of the people to the Iranian border to support the Spanish and Italians in the middle of nowhere. No thanks!

The other picture was taken from atop a guard tower that overlooks the dust off landing zone, our FST is off behind the T-walls. All of the other tents are part of the tent city, somewhere in there is mine. Also the bathrooms (essentially a port-a-potty with make-up), shower facilities about a 200 yard walk (going to be interesting trek in the winter).

You can also see that our FOB is surrounded by villages which actually appear to be very green and full of orchards. This is a part of the local area that I never get to see. I joke with Sarah all the time that all that needs to happen is for me to start making license plates and I will be serving out a 6 month sentence in prison. In fact, most prisoners get a real building to sleep in, a cable TV in their room, and except for that there are not many differences in where I am an jail! Maybe I will write my congressman and ask for a license plate stamper...