On the days leading up to Christmas 2008, I was waiting at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Diamondback for a ride back to Q-West, a remote base where I’d been living for the past four months. I’d just finished four days of Rest and Relaxation in Doha, Qatar. Travel from a remote Army base outside Mosul to Qatar and back had stretched my time away to almost two weeks, but the travel through highly targeted bases hadn’t been pleasant.
I was a Navy psychiatrist, fresh out of residency training. The deployment had been rough so far. In October, one of my patients committed suicide, and afterward, I had to medically evacuate out of Iraq nine soldiers for wanting or attempting to kill themselves.