Valentines Day was extra sweet for U.S. Army Maj. Frederick Harris.
Harris is a flight surgeon in the Army’s 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division based in Ansbach, Germany. His unit was recently redeployed from Tikrit, Iraq, and he arrived home on leave on Feb. 8. The next morning, he married girlfriend Raxaben Gokani, who will return with him to Germany Feb. 23.
Harris grew up in Potomac, attending Bells Mill Elementary, Cabin John Middle School, and Winston Churchill High School. He attended Montgomery College for a year, and then transferred to the University of Illinois, graduating in 1989. He received flight training in the Navy between 1989 and 1993. He attended medical school on an Army scholarship and first practiced as a flight surgeon in Egypt, near the Israeli border from August 1999 to June 2001.
Upon returning, he completed his medical residency and earned a Masters in Public Health. He was assigned to 1st infantry and sent to Ansbach in August of last year. He was immediately deployed to Tikrit, where his unit was already stationed. Harris saw patients and flew CH-46 helicopter missions from the Tikrit base for four months before being redeployed.
Gokani is a telecommunications engineer from Cambridge, Mass.
* Why did you join the Navy?
“I just always wanted to fly. I’d go out to the airpark, the Montgomery County Airpark and just watch the planes as a kid. You look at the cost of flying and you get the military to pay for it [it’s nice]. You get excellent training. It is unusual. There aren’t too many people form this community who go to the military. But it pays well. You meet great people.”
* Is there a rivalry between aviators in different branches of the military?
“I have to admit the Air Force is probably the best service [for aviation]. The Air Force is the hardest one to get a slot for pilot training in. … If you’re physically qualified to go to the Air Force Academy, you’re expected to go into flight school. The Naval Academy, only about 20 or 25 percent of the class goes into pilot training. But I think some people they just have images of taking off from an aircraft carrier.”
* What do you fly?
“CH-46 helicopters. Usually the top third of the students in flight training will get jets. And most of the rest will get helicopters.” [laughs]
* What is a flight surgeon?
“It’s a primary care physician for pilots and other crew members who are on flight status. They have special needs. There are all sorts of medications that they can’t take.
Most flight surgeons are not pilots. I think there’s a bit more credibility with flight surgeons who are aviators.
The military is one of the few places where you don’t just always go straight through and do your entire residency, because they have a need for general practitioners taking care of the soldiers. So it’s normal to just do an internship, go to the six-week flight surgeon school and just go out to a field unit, and then after doing that for a couple years then go back and do a complete residency. I went back to the United States to do an aerospace medicine residency and then found out I was going to First Infantry Division.”
* What were your impressions of Iraq?
“I mean, the only time I left the base camp was to go flying. I certainly flew to Baghdad plenty of times. And Kirkuk. But you can’t really tell what’s going on from the aircraft. At nighttime you can see some tracer routes. … We’re fairly secure inside the base camp. Being outside Tikrit, fairly frequently there were rockets and mortars landing inside the camp. But you have no idea what’s going on in the community outside. You could see some of the burning oil well fires outside too. It’s weird, I mean the flying, it was fun. Because they fly 130, 140 knots, 50 feet off the ground, to avoid enemy fire. … But every now and then I look back on and I think, ‘Wow, that wasn’t very smart.’
“I was fortunate to miss out on most of the [combat]. I was only there for four months. …
“Our unit was very fortunate that nobody was seriously injured. Certainly some of the other units [weren’t so lucky].”
Gokani: “His mom and I, we would send e-mails back and forth. Did you hear from him today? Have you gotten an e-mail yet? Haven’t heard from him in 24 hours, have you heard anything? You know, that kind of thing. … But the infantry division has a really good Web site, so I’d get on there and get the scoop on what was going on with the location he was at in Iraq.”
* What’s your day to day life like in Iraq?
“Usually, I see patients twice a day, Monday through Saturday. There were a lot of meetings. You just constantly go to meetings. As a brigade flight surgeon, you’re not just providing patient care, you’re an advisor to the brigade commander on the unit health status. We Medevac patients every now and then.
“[It’s] just a couple miles from the Tigris river. It’s not sand, it’s just fine dirt. The dirt gets in everything. In your computer, in your shoes, in your clothes. … It was about 115 tops when I got there [in August], but it had been a lot hotter than that before I got there. In the wintertime it gets below freezing at night.
“There’s just nothing to do but work.”
* How do you feel being over there and having Iraq be such a political issue here?
“I can’t really talk about it. Let me put it this way: I read Harpers, the Atlantic, and the Nation magazine. I listen to NPR. So, I’m a little bit different compared to my peers in the army. I’m a pretty typical lower Montgomery County person as far as that’s concerned. We’re not big fans of Fox News.”
* What is life stationed in Germany like?
“It’s nice. I’ve only been there for a few weeks, but it’s real nice. We found a house right in the middle of town. We can walk to the grocery store. We can walk to restaurants, walk to the shops. I think we’re more Europeans at heart. Recycling — it’s an obsession in Germany. Just not driving everywhere. It’s nice because it’s in the heart of south central Germany, in the heart of Bavaria so the countryside is beautiful. … We’re exactly halfway between Munich and Frankfurt.
“I think there are people who feel like they’re isolated, who don’t really leave the bases too much. We’ll be doing most of our grocery shopping right there across the street instead of at the commissary. The irony is a lot of the products … most of the staples are less expensive than they are at the commissary.”
Gokani: “Since we live off base, we can experience the culture more. So I felt like I needed to learn the language. We’re going to be there for a couple of years. … If I can help it, I’d like to work off base, [but so far] the main thing we’ve seen there is the sausage factory. I don’t know what type of software testing they do there.”
* What happens from here?
“I don’t know. There’s all this realignment going on. … Both First Armored Division and first infantry division, which are the two big units in Europe — it’s very much up in the air as to what’s going to happen over the next few years. … I’ll probably stay in Europe until 2007. It would probably be at least two years before going back to Iraq. There are rumors that we could go to Afghanistan in about a year.”