This morning as I tried to wring the last hour out of my night's sleep, tossing and turning through malaria-medicine-altered dreams, I awoke for good when the GIANT VOICE started talking.

No, I'm not psychotic - the FOB has a loudspeaker system for times when a large number of people have to be notified of something quickly. "BEEP BEEP" said the GIANT VOICE. "ATTENTION ON THE FOB. ATTENTION ON THE FOB..." Then came the calls for the Quick Reaction Force (QRF), followed moments later by the call for the medevac flight teams.

...followed (predictably) minutes later by the call for the trauma team. I was already getting dressed, and came to the hospital to see what was inbound. This was the reason for the friendly wakeup call. We worked for several hours on a soldier who had something that looked like a large framing nail driven through his neck by the blast, lacerating the jugular vein, passing right behind the throat, and missing both of his carotid arteries by millimeters. After dissecting out all the vital structures that we could access, we...held our breath and pulled the twisted shard of metal out. No bleeding...good. Not so good was the injury that appeared to have severed all the blood vessels supplying his leg below the knee. We managed to thread a tiny plastic tube, a "shunt", into the cut ends of one of his leg arteries to keep his leg and foot alive until he goes to Bagram, where my colleagues worked on him later today.

Every couple of minutes as I write, I just about wet my pants when the FOB's howitzers erupt with a BOOM so loud it sounds like it's outside your door. They tend to choose bedtime for the fireworks show. I don't know who they're shooting at (could be anyone within 15 miles or so, I think), but it's not going to turn out well for the guy on the other end.

This article from the Washington Post is a super followup to my last post. You can't ask for a better outcome than to see an airman's smiling face on the Post's website.

I'll start accompanying the posts with pictures when I get my camera. It should be here soon, so long as no one along the mail route gets a hankering to have their very own Canon Digital Elph.

Khushpah Waladeh. Have a good night.