Today was probably the best day I've had on the deployment. It was pretty rad. So at our location, we don't have an incinerator. This is not important for any other reason for me, except that it means there is no way to properly dispose of expired or used medications. These tend to pile up in the pharmacy and need to be destroyed from time to time.
Lucky for us, there are people to blow things up every day out here. Enter EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal). You know, the bomb squad guys. These are the guys that disarm Times Square car bombs or really any other type of explosive device that needs handling.
So our pharmacist arranged for us to add our meds to their explosion of the day. We thought we might be lucky to see some cool boom with a brick or two some Jack Bauer C-4 or something.
Not even close.
We got to load this pack with all sorts of fun. All in all, 675 lbs of C-4 (540 bricks), plus grenades of all sorts, missiles tubes, 25 caliber shells, and lots of things that go boom. And we carefully, of course, and strategically laid brick by brick of C-4 onto this huge old pile of arms/explosives.
And on top of all that, we placed our dinky little two bags of meds.
The EOD guys were really cool and let us get our hands on and build the pack with the rest of them, explaining a bunch of the weapons to us clueless medics. In the end, they let our logistics NCOIC press the detonator to make this:
(we packed the bright one on the right)
The whole day was pretty fun. From the wild sandy, pile of rocks and holes road, having the humvee pull our van out of the sand, to playing with C-4, making a really, really big bang, and handling ordnance all day we pretty great. Didn't feel like a deployed dentist at all.
That being said, 30 mins after getting back to the clinic after the grand adventure, I was knee-deep in starting a root canal on a patient... Welcome home, I guess.
(the after hole, verifying the destruction of our meds)
5 comments:
that' crazy. and scary. and cool.
that is a really big explosion. I am really glad you didn't get blown up. I'm also gla you're a dentist and not an EOD soldier. but I am glad that you had a fun day though.
oh yeah. stay tuned. I'm going to try to add some video footage when I get it from one of my buddies.
you're "Fired!"
Can hardly wait for the video footage. What a diversion from your clinic work...just like the movies. Who would have thought you'd be making explosions!!!
Stephen: you are so funny.
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