A Cold Day for Mortar Explosions

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, <a href="https://medium.com/human-parts/the-day-he-left-the-base-for-good-9526eff06353" rel="noopener">one of my patients committed suicide</a>, and afterward, I had to medically evacuate out of Iraq nine soldiers for wanting or attempting to kill themselves. <a href="https://medium.com/the-memoirist/a-cold-day-for-mortar-explosions-cc36b127fc96">Click Here</a>