Taking a break from my duties in Mosul, Iraq, I popped a strawberry-and-banana Starburst in my mouth. I wanted to savor the flavor as long as possible, but my tongue detected a solid chunk of foreign matter. I pulled out the gooey Starburst and discovered a piece of a tooth sticking in the morass.
I felt my teeth, and two more pieces of a bicuspid snapped off at the gum line. Staring at the three small shrapnel of bone in my hand, I first wondered if I could get triple indemnity from the tooth fairy. The pain told me more serious problems required my attention.
Everything I knew about medical services on the front lines I learned from “M*A*S*H” — talented doctors, under stress, lacking essential equipment, manage to accomplish remarkable results while using humor to maintain their sanity. But I had never thought of dentists in combat zones until the day I needed to see one.
The dental office was located in a building being demolished because of indirect fire damage. No signs out front hinted at the diabolical dentistry performed within. I pulled open the rickety screen door and entered … the combat dentist zone.
I laid the tooth particles on the front desk. The soldier seated there looked at them, then up at me, with a grin that reminded me of Peter Lorre in “Arsenic and Old Lace” — “You broke a tooth!”
I pointed to the gap in my mouth.
“Please sit here.” He gestured to a stool next to a laptop. The assistant asked me to hold an imaging plate behind my tooth while he pointed a pen-shaped digital camera at it. I was impressed, but then found out it was the ONLY piece of modern dental equipment they possessed.
He examined the digital image and announced, with the surety of an apostolic revelation, “It’s broken!” Then he turned to the other occupant of the room. “What do you think, doctor?”
The dentist turned around and glared at the screen from halfway across the room. “We’ll need to do a root canal.”
I survived months of mortar bombardments, rocket attacks and roadside bombs, but a Starburst made me need a root canal. I hate root canals!
The dentist directed me to relax in the dental chair, which was actually a plastic lounge chair that can have one end raised for the head and the other lowered for leg comfort. No rinse sink, no visual reality options, no music, no nitrous oxide, not even the gurgle of a fish tank. I could not relax.
Soldiers and units frequently borrow or appropriate supplies to continue their mission. The dentist office was no exception. Out of anesthetic, the dentist prepared my gums for a shot by pinching them. Then he lifted a needle so large I knew that it once belonged to the veterinary unit.
“This should only hurt a little bit,” soothed the dentist. His comment was followed by a pain so intense I would have preferred a punch to the mouth from Mike Tyson. He then raised a drill and bit large enough to belong to the demolition team that worked there at night. After drilling for several minutes, he asked his assistant for a file. The dentist’s helper, obviously a recent graduate of the Dental Assistants School for Troglodytes, handed over a file large enough to facilitate a prison break.
“No, I mean those small files there. Let’s try the white one.”
The assistant complied and the dentist screwed it into my tooth. “This one seems too large; do we have a smaller one?”
The assistant fumbled with a few files, but could not locate one.
“Well, we will have to make do. I am sure this will only hurt a little bit,” he told me in the same Boris Karloff voice I no longer trusted.
He drilled, and filed, and drilled, and filed, and drilled, and stopped abruptly. He muttered to himself as he walked over to the laptop screen to study the x-ray; “There should be two roots in there!”
I wanted to bolt out of there, but Troglodyte boy was blocking the only door. The dentist returned to conduct what he called “an exploratory drill to find the other root.”
After locating the second root, he sadistically addressed his eager assistant, “You can tell a root is active when it squirts blood like this.” I did not feel as overjoyed as he sounded. After packing the hole, he issued my final instructions.
“You can get a crown when you return to the states. Oh … I better give you a prescription for painkillers. Are you allergic to codeine?” I shook my head, unable to say anything coherent.
“Good, you’ll need them.”
After returning home, I went to a local dentist who specializes in crowns. After reviewing his x-rays, he commented, “This is one of the best prep jobs I have ever seen. Who did the work?”
At that moment, I realized the combat dentists were exactly like the “M*A*S*H” doctors — very talented dentists, performing in a high-stress environment, lacking essential equipment, yet achieving remarkable results and using humor, even if their patients didn’t recognize it at the time.
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Frank Selden, a Bellevue attorney, served with the Washington National Guard as an intelligence analyst in Mosul, Iraq. Selden’s tale of his trip to the dentist won a second-place award at the division level of Toastmasters’ humorous speaking contest. More on Selden’s story of his service in Iraq can be found in his book, “Finding Faith in the Fury,” which is available through his Web site, www.frankselden.com, or from Amazon.
