Down at FRAGO Rock

In September of 2006, I was driving north on I-35 from Ames, IA to Minneapolis, when I heard the breaking news on the radio that there had been a coup de etat in Thailand, that while the prime minister was abroad, the military had taken over the government. This would have been merely of passing interest to me if my parents were not in Bangkok that week for my dad to give briefings at our Army infectious disease laboratory in AFRIMS. The briefing, and all government business, were canceled for the day, and workers were instructed to go shopping.

Last month, there was a coup de etat in Honduras in which the president was forced from his home in his pajamas at gunpoint and flown to Costa Rica. Now, I'm not a geography expert, but if I were in Honduras and were given a free upgrade to Costa Rica, I wouldn't complain or ask too many questions, but apparently the president did not see it this way. The matter is still somewhat unsettled. I lived in northern Honduras immediately following undergrad, and I still haven't heard from my friends down there, friends who used to warn us not to leave our house on election day.

We hear about instability and catastrophes in the world every day--election irregularities in Iran, a cyclone in Burma, a tsunami in Indonesia, a shooting rampage in Mumbai--and it's easy to get desensitized, to assume these things are far away and don't affect me. And then something happens to show us that we are not so far away and disconnected after all.

Med school can be pretty all-consuming, especially around finals time, so I hadn't been following the news about Fort Indiantown Gap-Jazeeristan, Pennsylvania all that closely. I had had some vague sense that, just by virtue of the fact that they use words like "democratic" and "people's" and "republic" in their official name, the government was probably on the sketchy side. Apparently this spring they held elections, the opposition party (PFJ - People's Federation of Jazeeristan, I think) won by a landslide, and the ruling party (DJPF) refused to relinquish power. So the US officially recognizes only the PFJ, this according to the CIA fact sheet about the country. Then, a few weeks ago, a cyclone hit FIG-Jazeeristan, wreaking havoc on an already impoverished population. The international community has tried to supply aid, but the government will only accept food and supplies, no personnel, and has even assassinated humanitarian aid workers. So far, only 10% of the population has received even basic food, shelter, and medical assistance. So the UN has sent a peacekeeping force in and called upon the US to assist. And as Fort Indiantown Gap Jazeeristan is located uncomfortably close to our current theater of operations, and even more uncomfortably close to a strategic Reese's peanutbutter cup production facility in Hershey, PA, it is in our national interest to intervene.

So we're shipping out tomorrow. We were supposed to spend the day joyriding in helicopters, but instead our operational orders came in. First we were reminded of how dangerous a world FIG-JZ can be. Major Burns showed us some videos graphic enough that there was a disclaimer beforehand that anyone at risk for PTSD should leave the room. They were just as unpleasant as advertised. But they weren't gratuitous like the death-metal bombs-dropping video montage propaganda pieces we sometimes have to watch. They just showed very explicitly that there are people in this world who are not above targeting civilians and hospitals, even occasionally the very doctors who have saved their lives.

Then Lt Col Schwartz took us through an exercise in how to make an assignment unnecessarily complicated. The problem is, once your assignment changes from "connect nine paper plates with four straight lines" to "provide security and stability to UN aid workers so they can deliver emergency shelters, food, water, and medical care to a homeless, starving, desperate civilian population by fending off attacks from outside terrorist groups and militias of an illegitimate government in inconsistent uniforms that have no qualms about hiding in dense urban centers or killing suspected civilian US sympathizers," well, then some of the complicated parts don't seem so extraneous. Then it becomes relevant to know that we'll be operating in dense, subtropical forest with suspected H1N1 bird flu and lyme disease, and that the illegitimate government is currently spreading all kinds of anti-US/UN propaganda on the state-owned television station while depicting their generals ceremoniously handing out confiscated supplies. So we have to be uber-careful not to alienate the civilians, who have been given reasons to suspect our motives in descending upon their country.

What this comes down to is that the word of the week will be "FRAGO," short for "fragmentation order" or "whoops, sorry, change in plans." The first one will probably come when our command informs us which of the two local factions listed on our original orders as alternately both the good guys and bad guys actually contains the bad guys and which one actually contains allies, not that individual Jazeeris with small arms can't change their mind at any time to gain access to black-market gasoline or to ingratiate their way out of a sticky situation with x or y local thugs. In the words of Lieutenant Anthon Lemon, "So our mission is to protect and kill everybody." When we asked Steve Colonna for clarification, the working assumption is "if they're not us, they're bad." He'll let us know when there's better intel than that.

Somehow, it seems like a less than brilliant idea for us to be entering a FIG-JZ, PA without having a clear idea who our real enemies and allies actually are or who's even a civilian. But there are civilians dying of dysentery and starvation without fresh water and food as we speak, and it would be too risky to let the country fall into total anarchy so close to the strategic peanut butter cup production facility, so we make our last stops for antihistamines and breath strips at CVS tonight and head off in the morning. Stay tuned.

Oh, yes, and if we have moderate success carrying a tune, the Alphaholics theme song will be the first chorus of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab." If that proves too artistically complicated, we'll try to master a chorus of "Margaritaville." While we're working up to those, the provisional theme song is a compassionately short 1-verse variation on "99 Bottles of Beer." In our platoon chants this morning, there was a tribute to the classic USUHS School of Nursing accessory, the rollie bag, one tribute to the effect of MREs on the GI tract, an anti-chant, and one unprintable that will just have to be left to the imagination. If someone can make it out to the craft store tonight, the cadre will also have a guidon, sporting the motto "Our faculty has more confirmed kills than your faculty."