Red Air

On days like today, when dust storms make being outside completely miserable (not to mention gritty in your mouth) I like to hole up in the EVAC shack and wait. What am I waiting for? The patients, that's who. For some reason, there is an unwritten law in Iraq that if the air is red, and medevac birds cannot land on our helipad to evacuate to a higher echelon of care, there will be many, many patients.

And that's great! Well, I digress, that's awful. But in my line of work, at least it's eventful. This deployment has really been lacking the fireworks of past combat tours. You can only sit in a trailer watching AFN for so long with boys who constantly have egg farts before you crave some actual work. And I'm not talking about all that motorpool work I do, I mean medical work. Real work that I was trained to do.

Most of the time I am a slick talker and I can convince a medevac bird to fly in bad weather. But on the off chance I fail, we get to load up the patient into our MRAPs and drive them to Balad, Iraq, to the level 3 hospital.

I have yet to go on one of these field trips to Balad with an actual patient. That is why I sit and wait when air is red now. I'm waiting for my turn with the action! I always manage to miss out! Even when air is super crappy when I'm already out on a mission, nothing happens if I'm along. I'm begining to think I am the Anti-Combat-Medical-Badge. Of course, it makes me a good luck charm for the convoy I'm part of. But damn, I have 6 weeks left on this deployment-- this is my second deployment-- and I still haven't gotten to be part of BIG action.

I still have 15 years left in the Army, so I suppose BIG action has a good chance of coming my way eventually. I can't wait to reenlist for a flight medic position so I can do more good for the most amount of people. EVAC in a brigade support battalion setting just isn't exciting to me.