A Publication of the University of North Carolina - UNC School of ...

FACULTY N EWS
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Faculty Focus:
Front-Line Dentistry
By Kelly Almond
Sometimes the generators
don’t provide enough power and
your drill can run low. This can
be…inopportune. But there’s no
indoor plumbing either, and it’s
oppressively hot, and you have
30 lbs of body armor parked
beside the clinic door. There
aren’t a lot of things about this
scene you’d call typical of a day
at the office.
Unless, of course, you’re
talking about your days at the
“office” on an army base in Iraq.
And that’s what UNC SOD
faculty member and army
reservist, Dr. Glenn Garland,
is doing this morning.
He’s emphatically low-key
about how he found himself on a
three-month tour there this past
spring (He was in the army
reserves for a long time after military
college, got called up with a
group of dentists, is “not a hero
or anything”), but he’s good with
a story. He remembers the little
stuff of life on an air base that
help distract the imagination
from the hair-raising details of
daily alarms sounding the call
to seek shelter at a base under
attack, or of a creeping nonchalance
about wearing a helmet
and weapon to work.
With a folder of photos at
the ready, Garland takes you
with him. There’s a helicopter
ride over Baghdad flying zigzag
maneuvers with a machine
gunner at your head (this for a
CE course, of all things). There’s
also the terrible day the PX
(akin to the base’s convenience
store) was hit, killing four and
wounding 12.
Happily, there are more
pedestrian memories too, like the
way the ground rises up around
your feet like brown flour when
you take a step, and how your
clothes line-dry in 30 minutes
in the parched climate, and the
baffling piles of military detritus
that appear and grow inexplicably
on the landscape.
A colorless place, “Camp
Anaconda” at Balad Air Base
stands a merciful 50 miles from
the most dangerous places in
Iraq. For this, Garland remains
grateful: “My duty was pretty
easy compared to
what a lot of
people over there
are faced with. As
a reserve dentist,
my tour was short
and I stayed on
base almost the
entire time.
That tends to
Garland
be a safer place to
be.” Yet the shrapnel holes in the
sign for the Anaconda Dental
Clinic suggest that “safer” is still
a long way from safe.
To be sure, the lack of
plumbing and electricity present
challenges, as does working with
the flimsy, underpowered dental
equipment the army provides,
but the practice of dentistry on
an army base has its advantages.
For one thing, it provides a
welcome known in a setting that
can change rapidly from the
unfamiliar to the surreal. For
another, it’s a service both
necessary and much-appreciated
by soldiers who can’t afford
the distraction of a toothache.
“Our clinic did mostly routine
care for the soldiers. We were
lucky that we didn’t see much in
the way of combat related
injuries,” explains Garland. “But
a lot of the soldiers traveled a
long way by convoy to get to
us — sometimes more than two
hours — which isn’t the safest
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