Thursday, August 02, 2007

Leaving Texas..........

Eli is now back in Mississippi. Here's an email he sent before leaving Texas:
Hello once again,
Tomorrow will be my last day in Texas, and as much as I complained about the humidity and all the rain, I will be sad to leave because of what I'll return to.......heat and mosquitoes. Camp Sheldy is not much to look forward to I'm afraid. However, I do look forward to being with Seth again, but I really enjoy being around all of the medical staff, and so I will be sad to leave.
Tonight we ordered Chinese and then ended up having a big water fight with some water guns some of the medics bought. There is a hose in the bathrooms, and so we lured the "bad guys" down to the bathroom and then proceeded to soak them. For the first time since coming on this deployment I felt normal, even if normal meant feeling like a kid again, it felt good!
The past several days we have been out in the field waking up at 3am and starting our training by 4am. Although 3am is way too early to start work, it was good training. We did a lot of simulated combat medical exercises with simulated gunshots and mortars going off, we used each other as the casulaties and put on fake blood and gore, bandaged eachother up, drug eachother around to reach "safety", and so pretty much we just played. The only thing that was not play was the IVs, which I gave several of and received several of. We went around talking to each other saying, "in the real world, how do you feel" or "in the fake world, how are you".
We'll "graduate" tomorrow and then leave at 2:00 in the afternoon and reach Shelby at 4am on Thursday (just in time for some infantry training!). It will probably be awhile before I am at a computer again, but thanks for all the e-mails people have sent me while I was here at Texas. When I get a chance I will update you from Mississippi. Take care,
With Love,
Eli

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