More Fun Things

Things are still going well. I am learning a lot of how they do things in the Army. Some are good, some ways are archaic, so I just go along with the flow and do OK.

I am learning about the Iraqi culture. A man is allowed to have more than one wife. I am not sure how they can afford it, but even some commoners have more than one wife. The other day, one of nurses was telling me about one Iraqi policeman who had 5 wives. If say 2 of them were fighting, he would call all 5 of them in, and hit them all to correct things. Man, imagine that going on in America. He would have been buried a long time ago.

The next little story I already emailed to some people, since it was funny, I thought I would put it here.

In category of "Lessons learned in Iraq" we have a pager system here that is pretty much next to completely useless. There are no phones here, very few cell phones. There is no phone in the ward, nor in my hut. There are phones in headquarters and main office for transferring patients and administrative things. So if they need me they page me and I have to go to the hospital to see what’s up. If I am at the gym or dining hall, a half mile away, they send somebody because the pagers don't go that far. So one night about a week ago, a nurse needed me for something. I didn't have a pager because I lost my original one, which they were real happy about. It wasn't too late, 10 PM, but then, I was in bed by 7-8PM. So the nurse comes over to my hut, she knocks on my door. I answer it, but forgot that the door opens out, not in. So when she opens the door out, I don't have a door to stand behind, so I am standing there in my boxers talking to this nurse. Funny thing is she has never knocked on my door since. Oh well, chalk that up to lessons learned.

Somewhere up the chain of command, I guess we are part of the Air Force command. Still not sure how that works, but I guess since we get a lot of soldiers flown in and we next to the airport, we are some division of the Air Force. The groups nickname is "Eagle Medics". The pic is right in front, first thing you see off the airfield. The other pic is my room.

Tom