BSA Troop 474

I am stationed in Balad, north of Baghdad. It's all dust. It's not sand as we know it. I wouldn't call it beach-like, either.

After Desert Storm, family support groups were told not to schedule beach-type vacations for returning service members, because beaches might not be well tolerated. After all, the soldiers were coming home from a grueling, sandy, hot place. The support groups had it wrong. There is water at a beach. And real sand, not the talcum powder that haunts us here day and night. No matter where you are, in a tent, in a latrine, in a shower, in an enclosed building, it's there, gritty, finer than talcum powder. It insinuates itself in the threads of your uniform and is everywhere on your body. It is constant and unrelenting. You never feel clean.

As I walk down the road from my headquarters to the mess hall (now they call them DFACs, or dining facilities), the breeze picks it up, suspends it in the air, and by the time I reach the sinks at the mess hall, my hands, just washed before I left the clinic, are filthy with dust. This is the environment in which we live, in which we fight, into which we have brought freedom. The dust that plagues us is not even always seen.

It is just there. Tonight, for instance, there is no breeze, but the constant traffic on the post churns it up so that there is a layer, not unlike a shoreline fog, that hangs suspended up to about 100 feet. Above that, the sky is clear, a crescent moon shedding a minor amount of light as the last rays of the sun fight to be remembered in the western sky.

We have seen several days of constant 35 mph and greater winds that pick up larger grains of sand and even small stones, throwing them against tents, trailers and soldiers. I've treated a number of eye injuries. Not everyone leaves their bunk with the protective equipment they were issued.

Fortunately, the injuries haven't been bad, and the soldiers have learned to take their eyewear with them. Meanwhile, we have to plan to anchor helicopters, which can topple in the stronger winds that are soon to be upon us. We've been told that the sands those winds carry can come from as far away as Syria.

Some claim that the Army discriminates against people with asthma, a condition in which the airway is unusually sensitive to irritation. The Army tends not to want to send asthmatics to places like this. Of course, that labels such soldiers as "non-worldwide deployable" and can jeopardize their careers. The Army is not cruel in this. It is smart. The dust gets farther down into the airways than we are used to at home. It is constant, not seasonal. Even non-asthmatics populate sick call with complaints of difficulty breathing.

The effect dust has on the equipment is just as devastating as on soldiers. Special filters have to go on the helicopters. The sand tears up the rotor blades. Computers suffer: Keyboards stick, hard drives and disks  routinely fail. But we adapt. The ingenuity of the American soldier is as ever-present as the sand and as powerful as the wind.

Col. Paul E. Casinelli, M.D., is the command surgeon with the 185th

Aviation Task Force in Iraq. Before deployment, he was the Connecticut

National Guard state surgeon.