Angel of Mercy Read Online Free PDF

daughter might have been thinking about…New Jersey or New York maybe. But overseas? And in the Army? In a war??? Linda composed herself and asked Chelsea if she had thought it through.
    With a steady voice that her mother could tell reflected the resolve inside, Chelsea told Linda about Guy’s death and the emotional journey that she had gone through as a result. She talked about the sense of peace that she felt about her decision, even though she knew the dangers and risks involved. Finally, she spoke of the passion for healing that had only come to the fore at Keystone, and how she could think of no better time or place for that passion to be allowed to play out than as a nurse in a combat setting.
    With a lump in her throat, Linda gave Chelsea her blessing to pursue her plans. Ultimately it wouldn’t have mattered to the final outcome whether she blessed the idea or not. Chelsea had always known her own mind. But Linda told Chelsea that she would support any decision that she made. Chelsea stepped around the counter and hugged her Mom, only to notice that Linda was laughing. Chelsea stepped back and looked at Linda with a puzzled expression.
    “I didn’t think you would laugh, Mom. What’s funny?”
    “Oh, Chelsea. When you called and said that you needed to come home and talk, I didn’t think that you were going to tell me that you were going to war. I thought you were going to tell me that you were pregnant!”
    Not pregnant but just as uncomfortable as if she had been, Chelsea braced herself against the bulkhead of the rocking C-17 Globemaster. Unlike in a passenger airliner, the crew of a troop transport doesn’t come on the loudspeaker and tell the passengers when there is heavy weather ahead. Therefore, Chelsea and her fellow passengers didn’t know that a storm front was battering the western Swedish coastline, and there was nothing that the pilot could do to get around it and still have fuel to get to his destination.
    Chelsea glanced at her watch. Two hours to go, she thought. Two hours and we’ll be on the ground.
    Two hours later Chelsea was indeed on the ground at Bagram Airfield just outside of Kabul. After the storm that she had flown through recently she was expecting something other than what she experienced on the ground. The heat was oppressive. On the way to the commander's office, Chelsea saw a temperature gauge. At first the reading of 49.4 degrees baffled her until she realized that she was seeing a reading in Celsius.
    A quick calculation told Chelsea that it was just a tick under 121 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time she reached the relative cool (100 degrees or so) of the commander’s office Chelsea had sweated through the lightest weight uniform that she possessed.
    She was met by a clerk in the office. The clerk, Sergeant Bascom by his stripes and name tag, quickly found the paperwork necessary to process Private First Class Chelsea Bannister into her Combat Housing Unit and connect her with the medical personnel with whom she would be working. Chelsea was given an order form for three sets of DCU’s (Desert Camo Uniforms) as well as a set of desert camouflage BDU’s (Battle Dress Uniform).
    The Army had just been phasing out the old woodland and desert-pattern uniforms the previous April, and Chelsea was one of the last to be issued a set. Chelsea took the order form promising to return it by 1700 hours the next day, and found her way to her CHU. She was expecting a barracks or spare apartment of some kind. What she found…was a box.
    A CHU (pronounced phonetically…Chew) is an aluminum box slightly larger [22'x8'] than a commercial shipping container, with linoleum floors and cots or beds inside. This insulated CONEX shipping container has a door, window, top vent, power cabling, and an air conditioner. One version houses four people while another is split into two, two-person rooms.
    The version with a shower and toilet shared between two rooms is called a "wet chu", which