You should know who I spend my time with outside of work, the people I look for in the mess hall when it’s crowded, and the people I share a rental car with on weekends. There’re the same three who showed up at Ft. Benning when I did, and we travelled to Germany on the same plane. One is a lieutenant, a registered nurse anesthetist with whom I’ll surely work in surgery. From St. Louis, the son of a CRNA too, he’s relatively new to the Army, but was a diver for the Navy for nine years. Then there is the Nicaraguan-born, American-raised neurologist captain from Mobile. He talks (in Spanish) to his wife and daughters in Mobile at least every three hours on one or another of his cell phones. Last is the lieutenant colonel radiologist from Wichita, Kansas, who has enough years in as an enlisted soldier before becoming an officer that he acts with great authority and self-assurance in all matters. He has three daughters (3, 5 and 7) who are set to join him here in a few weeks in a rental house off base. He’s been raising them with the help of his parents since his wife, a young pediatrician, passed away several years ago of a non-curable malignancy. Together, both medically speaking and not, we have all the bases covered, and enough linguistic ability between us to travel anywhere in Europe. And more than enough jokes, old or new, funny or not, to make the autobahn ride seem not so long. Gotta go.