Thanks, here is another one.
I and our little advance party had been over in the Desert a month already in somewhat austere conditions, but day by day it got better. I think I must be part mongrol, because I was quite tolerant of our living conditions and besides, combat troops were scattered around living in muddy foxholes, and had it so much worse than us. A month or so later, our "main body" arrived by truck from the port of Dahran, where we had come in before. Late one evening after their own 300 mile trip in open trucks, they rolled into our growing little tented hospital, and with the arrival of the almost 400 troops, we could really get our EVAC up and ready for the coming ground war. It was still cold and wet, and muddy every where. I welcomed the commander, and promptly found the newly arrived troops, half of them female, wanted to somehow find a way to tell their families stateside that they had arrived safely. So I went to each residence tent, and told the unpacking troops that they were to select one of their comrades, and meet me at the truck park in a half hour with the home phone numbers of their tent buddies, and I would take their selection in trucks to a phone bank some miles away. I left it up to the tent crews to choose their representative, as I wasn't about to get into that decision process.
So as the darkness came down, in minutes as it does near the equator, I loaded them up, and lead our several trucks across the desert to the phone bank, this being a tent set up with rows of pay phones, guarded of course, where troops were given no more than ten minutes to make collect calls back home. It was near a track park, and the tanks and APC's and other vehicles had churned up the mud that it was like pea soup, over our boot tops, just a mud wallow. After the soldiers had made their calls, giving the folks back home the numbers of their tent buddies to call and reassure, I gathered them all up and told them to mount up to head back. At which point some of the female troops, and male troops also told me they had to go to the bathroom, and asked where the porta potties were. I told them there are no porta potties in combat zones, and they should just go. I needed to clarify this, and then told the females to go on the right side of the trucks, the males on the left, and so they did, in all that mud and rain. It went a long way to introduce them to what it was going to be like from then on. And so they soon took to assembling our hospital with vigor and dedication.
When I met our commander, he told me I was then and there the new Chief of Professional Services, or the head physician, as I was the only one in our unit with prior wartime experience. I immediately set up our physician team of 24 highly talented doctors like a civilian hospital, coordinated rounds, a call system, peer review, and because of their dedication to duty and our patients, they functioned magnificently, and I will forever be proud to have been associated with such a team.
One day, before the full hospital arrived, one of our female nurses, also on the advance party, found that her husband was at the HQ of combat brigade further out in the desert, and asked if she could somehow go see him. So I checked out a HUMVEE, and drove her miles forward, found the field HQ, and when she met her husband, told her it was about dark, and we needed to be heading back very soon. She and He could have ten minutes alone in his tent, while I guarded the door flap for their privacy, and she came out in ten minutes with appreciation, and we headed back. The mud was so deep it flowed over the hood of my HUMVEE like some great dark wet blanket. We made it back just fine.
It is one AM, and I just got home from a 13 hour shift in a Pediatric Urgent care center up in Charlotte, where I work occasionally. A Heinekin beer and some pretzels, and now off to bed. I am taking a tire up to Charles T's place two hours away in the AM to have a new NDT put on the rim, and will return with my rebuilt carb, starter, generator, and fuel pump, although I am not going to put the latter on.
I was privileged to serve back in ''72-'73 as commander of a 14 man Special Forces A team with the Fifth Group for 18 months. On an A Team the Commander carries just as much gear, pulls the same guard duty and every other task as his men. I learned that a Commander who looks after the welfare and morale of his men has a far greater cohesive force than a disinterested Commander does. And so I carried that trait also with me in my second war, Desert Storm.
Here is an ariel view of our EVAC, surrounded by a ten foot berm, the living tents on the right, the hospital itself in the middle, with trucks blocking on of our two entrances.
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