This Just in From Afghanistan

So Mandy has been harassing me to write a blog about my deployment so far. Normally she writes them all and I proof read them so this is a change for me.

Well I started my deployment by going to Ft. Benning GA first to attend the CONUS Replacement Center(CRC). CRC is where they make sure that all your medical stuff/vaccines are up to date, you have completed all the required training, and get issued all your deployment gear. It is for military, other government employees, and contractors who are going to combat zone.

Mandy stayed the first two nights with me. We booked a cheap hotel room that had decent reviews online. When we got to our room it reeked of cigarette smoke even though we had requested a non-smoking room. So we called the front desk and asked if there had been a mistake. The front desk person said that was a non-smoking room but changed our room for us. The second room smelled even worse and the window wouldn’t open to let fresh air in. So we called back and the front desk person again was surprised by it but said there were no more rooms and that we could go back to the first one. Needless to say we went back to the first one and bought a couple of bottles of Febreeze to make it smell a little better. You can’t trust everything you read on the internet. Mandy dropped me off the first day and I checked in and got my room but stayed at the hotel with her that night. It was hard to say good bye to her when she dropped me off again the next day. 9 months can seem like an eternity at the beginning. I do look forward to the end of my deployment and going back home to her.

The rest of that week was actually pretty boring. My home unit had made sure I had pretty much all my pre-deployment stuff done before I got to CRC. So I ended up doing a lot of sitting around and waiting while everyone else got all their pre-deployment stuff done. I did get meet some great people and we did go to the shooting range one day which was fun.

At the end of the week we flew out of Ft. Benning to Kuwait with a few hour lay-over in Ireland. I can say that I have been to Ireland although all I really saw was the airport. The flight was a civilian run airline contracted by the Army. We had to keep our firearms on us(with no ammo) but any knives or sharp objects had to be placed in our checked luggage(because all the military folks are going to hijack their own plane). It was late at night in Ireland when we got there and we were only supposed to be there for 2 hours so we deplaned and hung out in the terminal. Well, 4hours later we still hadn’t re-boarded yet. There was free Wifi which kept crashing so trying to use the internet was a major pain and most everyone gave up after a little while. They fed us some food and several people tried to get some sleep on either the uncomfortable benches or hard floor. We finally flew out at sometime around 8am for Kuwait. I was exhausted by the time I got there.

Kuwait is called tent city because it is full of tents and is just a transient post for people going to and from deployments. I was worried that I would get stuck in Kuwait for a few days but they had a flight in a few hours to Bagram Airfield(BAF). The flight to BAF was on a military C-17. Last time I was in one of those I fell out(go airborne). C-17s are big and enclosed so there are no window seats and the chairs didn’t recline. We arrived in BAF in the morning and from there I was put on a stand-by list for a flight to Fob Fenty. Unfortunately, there was some bad weather in BAF and a couple of flights got cancelled so I got push way down on the stand-by list. I ended up staying 3days in BAF. Luckily the Concussion Care Clinic(CCC) in BAF only had 2 patients so they allowed me to stay there. Otherwise I would have been stuck in a tent for 3days. The CCC in BAF is nice and had its own MWR internet café. I was able to skype with Mandy everyday and MAJ Brown the chief of the clinic showed me how she ran things there. Most of the day I spent running back and forth between the CCC and the airport seeing if I got on a flight. Finally I got on a flight late at night and arrived at FOB Fenty at 3am.

My clinic at FOB Fenty

FOB Fenty is nice and smaller than BAF which was nice but it is still a larger base here in Afghanistan. MAJ Gray the OT that I replaced showed me around and introduced me to everyone. We had planned a 3 day overlap so she could show me everything but that turned into almost a week as the weather interrupted flights and she had to wait to get on a flight to BAF and from there to Kuwait. She was also leaving the same time as the major unit here was pulling out and being replaced by another unit. So there were a lot of people coming and going. That made the FOB very congested and busy. Hopefully I will miss some of that when I leave because the new unit is only here for 9 months as well. 

The first while here was very slow and I didn’t have any concussion patients. I would help the aid station out by seeing people that had an arm injury or tendonitis. I was very bored and tried to find things to fill my time. We say that it is good for me to be bored because it means that people aren’t getting hurt. But, it sure makes the time go by slowly. When the new Physical Therapist got here we started traveling to the different smaller FOBs to assist the medics and Physician Assistants by seeing any patients that fell within our scope of practice. We go to the different FOBs by helicopter which is fun(I wish I could go everywhere by helicopter). The following month started to pick up a little as the new unit got settled in and started to go out on missions and the fighting season started(the insurgents don’t like to fight when it is cold so they don’t do much over the winter). The war here is in a transition phase as the Afghan National Army is being required to take a more active role in suppressing the insurgency and the U.S. troops take on a more mentoring type role. Hopefully, it stays quiet here. Well that is all that has occurred so far.