here and gone

Hello everyone! Welcome to the Doctor's office, the blog of Mike Muntifering: deployed soldier and unofficial health care provider to the 192nd Quartermaster Company out of Milan, Ohio. I've been gone since November 8th, 2006 and have traveled to Fort Hood Texas, Fort Harrison, Montana, back to Fort Hood, and this Monday, we head to Kuwait. This is me:

"battle rattle" as they call it

Yes, I am wearing body armor, and that is a rifle slung across my back. Notice I am also drinking coffee. We do a lot of that in the Army. On this day, in particular, we had our farewell ceremony, and our MACOM (major command) commander came down from Minnesota to see us off. He's a Major General, two stars, and apparently does a lot of important stuff, like this:this man commands over 10,000 people, and this is what he does with his day...

Hooray! Coffee for all! These are your tax dollars hard at work, ladies and gentlemen.
Let me fill you in on some of our back story. Like I said, we were deployed from Milan, Ohio on November the eighth. From there we traveled to North Fort Hood, Texas. It's kind of desolate here. All of the buildings are poured concrete floors and cinder block walls, painted a boring white. My friend Dan Van (you can access his blog here) says it is a crappy eggshell, about 40 degree gloss. He's a paint salesman. All of the windows are at eye level, which makes me feel like I'm perpetually in a basement. here's an example, but I doctored the photo a bit to make this seem like a pleasant place:

Pretty, pretty sunset. After a few days, some briefings and shots, and a generally horrid time doing paperwork, we departed for Montana. The post was Fort Harrison, which is just outside of Helena. We were living the life of Riley there, with our single man rooms and the like. It was a good time from the start. Here's my room:nice and organized

It was nice. After a while we began to have "circle meetings," as they were called by Spc. Simmons, where Dan and I drank PBR and listened to Simmons rant about various things.disheveled and fun!

As with all systems' tendency to drift toward chaos, my room followed the laws of entropy. It was also the central meeting point for these "circle meets." Note the empty 18 pack of Miller High Life. It's a good thing that you can't see the trash can, because in all likelihood it was overflowing with beer cans and Bacardi bottles. Not a lot to do in Montana, you see.
At any rate, after a month of all this stuff, which included some really neat times, like climbing nearby Mt. Helena and seeing lots of mule deer, we had to go, our new job skills in tow.

high atop the mountain top

this would make me scared of deer

After a fun time in Montana, we left to go back to Fort Hood. We were there for a week, and then we got to go home!
Upon returning to Texas in early January, we began lots of training to get us ready to go to Iraq. We did things like rifle qualification, combat patrols, convoy exercises, force protection, the gas chamber, and again, lots of paperwork and shots. This time it was dreadful because I had to get my smallpox vaccination. For anyone who doesn't know how this works, it's dreadful. Most vaccines are made from an attenuated virus and injected into you. The virus is attenuated through serial passage, which is a kind of selective breeding for viruses. Not with the smallpox vaccination. It essentially hasn't changed since Edward Jenner gave the first one waaaaay back in 1796.
They take a small needle with two tips and jab your non-dominant shoulder three times. After inducing a small amount of blood, they swab on a paste containing live cowpox virus (a close relative of Vaccina virus, hence the term "vaccine") and proceed to bandage it up. After a few days, it gets gross, like so:

this is real fear

I think that it's going away, however.
That pretty much brings us up to speed, so I'll have to get back to you when something eventful happens, like us leaving. As of now, we fly on Monday on one of these:

That's a DC-10. I had to pull this picture direct off of the Boeing website, under the "out of production category." Thanks again, Uncle Sam. The last one of these bad boys rolled out in 1989. It should be fun.